Problem
So, if you have been doing development with Visual Studio 2010, Entity Framework CodeFirst, SqlServer or SqlServerCE for any amount of time, you’ll quickly run into the problem that the database can not be reinitialized because it is open. Basically, the scenario is this.
1) Put in your Global.asax.cs file a line that always recreates the database (naturally because you are in a development mode and as you constantly change your model and seed data). The line is something like this: Database.SetInitializer(new DropCreateDatabaseAlways<SiteDB>());
2) Run your application with something like Debug/Run (All is fine)
3) Go into the database browser (either in Visual Studio or Enterprise Manager) and look at some data.
4) Run your application again and you will get this error: “[SqlException (0x80131904): Cannot drop database "NewYorkTimesDb" because it is currently in use.]”. This is because your database browser has a connection to the database and until it is dropped, you can not drop the catalog.
Solutions
The easiest and guaranteed to work solution is just to restart your SqlServer database server (control panel, services). This is what I use to do but finally got tired of that because it takes about 20 seconds and, well, I’m very impatient.
The other solution I found in the forums (can’t find the link right now) is to execute the following script from the master database catalog:
use master ALTER DATABASE NewYorkTimesDb SET SINGLE_USER WITH ROLLBACK IMMEDIATE ALTER DATABASE NewYorkTimesDb SET MULTI_USER
Basically, just switching from multi-user to single-user and back clears the connections.
HTH’s!