EF Core bugs that look like correct code
Most EF Core bugs I've seen in production aren't from bad code. They're from code that looks right. It compiles, it passes review, it works fine locally against a database with twelve rows in it. Then it hits a table with five thousand rows, or a second replica, or a request that gets cancelled halfway through, and it falls over in a way nobody wrote a test for. None of the mistakes below are exotic. They're the default behavior of EF Core when you don't opt out of it, or the default behavior of a deployment when nobody thought about what "five pods start at the same time" actually means. Here's the setup I use and the list of ways it goes wrong if you skip a step. The entity namespace Sample.Domain.Posts ; public sealed class Post { public Guid Id { get ; private set ; } = Guid . CreateVersion7 (); // sequential → index-friendly public required string Title { get ; set ; } public required string Slug { get ; init ; } public string Body { get ; set ; } = string . Empty ; public DateTimeOffset ? PublishedAt { get ; private set ; } public Guid AuthorId { get ; init ; } public uint RowVersion { get ; set ; } // optimistic concurrency token public void Publish ( TimeProvider clock ) { if ( PublishedAt is not null ) throw new DomainException ( "Post is already published." ); PublishedAt = clock . GetUtcNow (); } } Two things here that are easy to skip and annoying to retrofit later. Timestamps are stored as UTC ( DateTimeOffset ), rendered in the user's timezone only at the edge — I do the same thing on ProcessHub, storing everything UTC and rendering in Asia/Tehran, because "what timezone is this in" is a much worse question to answer after the data already exists in three different formats. Second: the clock comes in as TimeProvider , not a call to DateTime.UtcNow buried inside the method. It's a small thing, but it's the difference between a test that can assert "publishing sets the timestamp to exactly this value" and a test that has to accept "sometime around now."