Developing ASP.NET Core web apps with MS SQL Server databases on macOS is not very straightforward, as I’ve blogged about before. There’s lots of custom scripts needed and it’s complicated for a new developer to get started in a project like this. My current project Gig Local had this very problem, so I decided enough was enough, and went all in with Dev Containers to make local development easier. In this post, I’ll walk through how to configure a Dev Container to develop an ASP.

GitHub has been evolving rapidly in the last few years. With the introduction of GitHub Actions and GitHub Packages, your continuous integration (CI) pipelines can be entirely implemented without leaving GitHub, reducing context switching and increasing productivity for engineers. In this post, we will work through setting up pipelines for a Docker based project including pull request (PR) validation, CI, publishing of CI images and publishing of release images, all in GitHub.

Developing and testing web apps that target Microsoft SQL Server are a breeze on Windows because you can leverage SQL Server Express LocalDB. This is not the case when developing on a Mac as LocalDB or SQL Server full are not available natively. The options are then to either target a remote database, either on-prem or cloud, which quickly becomes expensive and pushes out the inner loop development time. Another option could be to use SQLite when in development, as this is supported on a Mac, but then you risk having unforeseen problems when deploying to production as the two databases are not equivalent.