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.

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.