Encryption Is Now Required for SQL Server Connection Strings

While I was presenting my workshop Building and Deploying a New Cloud App from Scratch at DEVIntersections yesterday the connection to the database kept failing. Which was weird because I’ve gone through the code quite a few times to make sure everything worked. The good thing is that it failed during the creation of the integration tests which demonstrated the benefit of creating them. However, that did not help me on stage. I was getting the following error:

A connection was successfully established with the server, but then an error occurred during the login process. 
(provider: SSL Provider, error: 0 - The certificate chain was issued by an authority that is not trusted.)

I could not figure out what was wrong. It worked a few days ago. Then one attendee said that he saw something similar last week, and he had to add another parameter to the connection string, encrypt=optional. I added that to the connection string, and it worked. I was able to continue with the workshop. However, I was curious why this was happening. I did some research and found that there was a breaking change to the Microsoft.Data.SqlClient, as outlined on the Entity Framework Core 7.0 Breaking Changes page. As it turns out, when I ran this workshop a week or so ago, I was using Entity Framework Core version 6.0 along with the corresponding version of Microsoft.Data.SqlClient version 6.0 and this change was introduced in Microsoft.Data.SqlClient version 7.0 which Entity Framework Core version 7.0 uses.

It turns out the change is important. I/we should have the proper certificates on the SQL Server. That’s the next thing I need to figure out how to do locally, so that I can continue to use the default connection string. However, I’m glad I found the issue and was able to continue with the workshop.

Hopefully, this helps someone else.