EF edmx update wizard not responding when updating models from SQL Server 2017

Recently when updating my db-first edmx from my SQL Server 2017 database, the update wizard would hang. I overcame this problem by temporarily changing the compatibility level of the db to 2012 like so:

So far this seems to have no ill-effects.

Completed 406 Not Acceptable with Devise

I had some trouble after an update of ruby/rails/gems on a something I hadn't worked on for ages. When register a user with Devise it would error with a Completed 406 Not Acceptable with Devise
As usual Stack Overflow came to the rescue, where I found this: "Devise responding to json by default has been removed from version 2.2" The fix was simple, I added this to my confif/application.rb and everything was working fine again:

config.to_prepare do
      DeviseController.respond_to :html, :json
    end

C# casting from parent to child object

For some reason I've never had to do this before (not that I can remember anyway), and it feels like I should have. I have a Child object that inherits from Parent. I want to turn an instance of a Parent object that I already have into a Child. I thought this might just be a simple cast but it doesn't work.

This SO post  was most helpful, and the neatest solution seemed to be this technique, serializing to json, and then back again:

 var serializedParent = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(parentInstance); 
 Child c  = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject(serializedParent);

Rebuild all indexes in your database

Exec sp_msforeachtable 'SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON; ALTER INDEX ALL ON ? REBUILD'
GO

Global error handling in filter attribute MVC Web api

When I inherited the first skeleton iteration of the api I'm working on every action was populated with largely repeated code whose function was to capture and log errors. I centralized all this into an attribute filter class called GlobalExceptionFilterAttribute, inheriting from ExceptionFilterAttribute, that looks a bit like this:

And then applied it to all actions with this line in WebApiConfig.cs:

config.Filters.Add(new GlobalExceptionFilterAttribute());

Then, throughout the app, we can throw different types of error pretty much anywhere and this will ultimately be captured by the filter attribute. So, for instance most of my service layer methods look like this:

Capturing raw data in Web Api controller

I needed to capture raw POSTed data in a Web API controller endpoint. This is how it's done:

using (var contentStream = await this.Request.Content.ReadAsStreamAsync())
            {
                contentStream.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);
                using (var sr = new StreamReader(contentStream))
                {
                    string rawData = sr.ReadToEnd();
                }
            }