title: Deploying offline with EF code-first migrations
body: <p>We develop an intranet web-app running off of the Microsoft stack that gets updated on client networks from time-to-time. Updates are done manually with two components:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Installing/extracting the new application files over the top of the old ones</li>
  <li>Executing an SQL script that runs the deltas between the previous and current version</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>We are in the process of migrating our codebase from ASP.NET WebForms / ADO.NET to ASP.NET MVC / Entity Framework 6.1. We are using code-first migrations for development, with automatic migrations setup.</p>
  
  <p>So my question is: how do we now translate that into production? Most posts around the web seem to contemplate using WebDeploy or a similar connected approach, but our files are distributed (via email, or download) then installed 'offline'. Is there a way we can leverage the migrations to have the database updated, or are we stuck using SQLDelta or equivalent to generate a change script to be executed on the client? </p>
  
  <p>With the power of Entity Framework to abstract away many of the physical aspects of storage it seems counter-intuitive that we would be reduced to an implementation-specific approach for deployment. Many Thanks.</p>