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);