SQL Server alias is not supported on .NET Core

Sharing is caring, so this is more to save time for other developers out there than to put something new on the table. Having set-up 3 different environments, development, Q&A, and Production for an ASP.NET Core application, I tried to preserve the naming on the configuration parameters so that rollouts between them would have a low impact on necessary changes.

One of the things I remembered was to create SQL Server alias with identical names between environments.

When I tried to execute the application using a SQL alias it failed. It seems that the support for SQL alias has been intentionally removed from CoreFX..

Reading further on, someone points out that SQL server alias information is stored in the registry on Windows. This is an OS-specific dependency that can work only on Windows. As a result, the project dropped support for SQL alias in core fx.

This is a useful lesson to raise awareness on how to improve your projects from .NET 5 onwards to be cross-platform.