asp.net mvc 4 - "Execute Code First Migrations" checkbox disappeared from my publish profile

Question

I'm using web deploy to deploy an MVC4 application using EF5 code first. I made a publish profile called "development" that uses web deploy for application and database using the 'Execute Code First Migrations' checkbox to run migrations on application startup. The publishing worked great for a while. At some point I added a new publish profile called "test" to deploy to another server, which uses the ftp method of deploy and no automatic migrations. This works fine too. However, when I tried to use my old "development" publish profile again, VS changes the settings automatically to the dbDacFx way ('Update database' checkbox instead of 'Execute Code First Migrations') and I can't get it back to the way it was. There were some other changes to the project while using the 'Test' profile, but nothing that seems to me like it could cause this. Does anyone know why VS thinks my project doesn't use code first anymore?

Answer 1

Since asking this question, I've run into this problem several more times in multiple versions of MVC and EF (all code first though of cource). When it happens, don't save the changes to your publish profile, make sure you are on the 'debug' build configuration, clean solution and rebuild solution. And if all that fails, restart Visual Studio and try again. So far, this has always solved the problem for me.