set ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT does not seem to be working - deployment

Question

I have followed along a book example and built an application called Sportstore (Pro ASP.Net Core MVC by Adam Freeman).
Now I am on the deployment chapter and he deploys to Azure.
I have created the databases on Azure, opened the firewall and opened a database with Visual Studio so I can see the Azure DB through the Visual Studio 2017 SQL Object Explorer. Pretty cool.
I have an appsettings.production.json file with the Azure Connection String.
So the author has us open a command prompt. He also shows the powershell commands but I just went to the command prompt.
I type:
set ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT=PRODUCTION
I don't get an error here but I also don't get any kind of confirmation. I believe I would get some type of message here if it worked.
Then I type:
dotnet ef database update --context ApplicationDbContext
Now I get the message:
No migrations were applied. The database is already up to date.
This is telling me it still thinks it is in development.
Is there a command to check what environment it is in?
I know you can set the system environment and reboot. But this seemed like you don't have to reboot.
Is this command the same as going to the Windows Environment variables dialog and changing it there. I know you have to reboot with that.

Answer 1

Yes that will set the environment variable ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT to PRODUCTION. You can see what environment variables are set by just running
set
in command prompt. You will get an output like:
C:\Users\username>set
ALLUSERSPROFILE=C:\ProgramData
APPDATA=C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming
ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT=DEVELOPMENT
CommonProgramFiles=C:\Program Files\Common Files
CommonProgramFiles(x86)=C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files
CommonProgramW6432=C:\Program Files\Common Files
COMPUTERNAME=mycomputername
ComSpec=C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe
...