Quickly Testing Database Connectivity within the Entity Framework

Answer 1

Set ConnectionTimeout to a low value

Answer 2

There really is no easy or quick way to resolve this. The ConnectionTimeout value is getting ignored with the Entity Framework. The solution I used is creating a method that checks if a context is valid by passing in the location you which to validate and then it getting the count from a known very small table. If this throws an exception the context is not valid otherwise it is. Here is some sample code showing this.

public bool IsContextValid(SomeDbLocation location)
{
    bool isValid = false;

    try
    {
        context = GetContext(location);
        context.SomeSmallTable.Count();
        isValid = true;                
    }
    catch
    {
        isValid = false;
    }

    return isValid;
}