entity framework 6 and pessimistic concurrency

One way to acheive pessimistic concurrency is to use sonething like this:

var options = new TransactionOptions
{
   IsolationLevel = System.Transactions.IsolationLevel.Serializable,
   Timeout = new TimeSpan(0, 0, 0, 10)
};

using(var scope = new TransactionScope(TransactionScopeOption.RequiresNew, options))
{ ... stuff here ...}

In VS2017 it seems you have to rightclick TransactionScope then get it to add a reference for: Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework.NETFramework\v4.6.1\System.Transactions.dll

However if you have two threads attempt to increment the same counter, you will find one succeeds whereas the other thread thows a timeout in 10 seconds. The reason for this is when they proceed to saving changes they both need to upgrade their lock to exclusive, but they cannot because other transaction is already holding a shared lock on the same row. SQL Server will then detect the deadlock after a while fails one transactions to solve the deadlock. Failing one transaction will release shared lock and the second transaction will be able to upgrade its shared lock to exclusive lock and proceed with execution.

The way out of this deadlocking is to provide a UPDLOCK hint to the database using something such as:

private static TestEntity GetFirstEntity(Context context) {
return context.TestEntities
              .SqlQuery("SELECT TOP 1 Id, Value FROM TestEntities WITH (UPDLOCK)")
              .Single();
}

This code came from Ladislav Mrnka's blog which now looks to be unavailable. The other alternative is to resort to optimistic locking.