UPDATE: Andres Aguiar has published some additional tips on his
blog that you may also find helpful when dealing with deadlocks.
Recently a customer asked a question about how to avoid
deadlocks when using EF. Let me first say very clearly that I
don’t actually hear about deadlock issues with EF often at all.
But deadlocks are a general problem with database applications
using transactions, and to answer this particular customer I
collected some information that then I thought could be worth
sharing in my blog in case someone else runs into problems:  I
won’t spend time in the basics of deadlocks or transaction
isolation levels. There is plenty of information out there. In
particular, here is a page in SQL Server’s documentation that
provides general guidelines on how to deal with deadlocks in
database applications. Two of the main recommendations that
apply to EF applications are to examine the isolation level used
in transactions and the ordering of operations.  Transaction
isolation level  Entity Framewor