Working through some self-study using the latest version of Microsoft’s free developer tools, Visual Studio 2017 and SQL 2016 Developer, and I have been hitting some weirdness in doing simple things like applying code-first database changes to a simple project…

Turns out the culprit is artifacts left behind on my system when I (in theory) uninstalled the older versions of these tools to start with a “clean slate”.    So I’m spending what amounts to a couple of days of work debugging things I shouldn’t be debugging because no developer tool uninstall from Microsoft is truly clean.

I’m starting to think I should look at a virtual machine host for my development.  I did it all the time at my old company, so the interface isn’t a concern, and I could build a truly clean slate environment when I want to upgrade tools.