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Microsoft Entity Framework (EF) Core

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.NET developers often used to write ADO.NET code to save or retrieve application data from the underlying database by using the following steps:

1. Open a connection to the database,
2. Create a DataSet to fetch or submit the data to the database, and
3. Convert data from the DataSet to .NET objects or vice-versa to apply business rules.

This was a cumbersome and error prone process. Microsoft has provided a framework called “Entity Framework” (EF) to automate all these database related activities for your application. It enables developers to work with data using objects of domain specific classes without focusing on the underlying database tables and columns where this data is stored.

EF Core is the successor to EF, but it is a complete rewrite and is not backwards compatible with previous versions of EF. The figure shows the process that EF Core goes through the first time you use your application’s DbContext.

The following prerequisites are required for an EF Core project:

• .NET Core SDK (Software Development Kit), which is a comprehensive set of libraries and tools that developers use to create, build, and run .NET applications and libraries,


• Visual Studio, which is the Microsoft’s flagship software or Integrated Development Environment (IDE),


• SQL Server, which is a relational DBMS from Microsoft, and


• Entity Framework Core, which could be downloaded via the option “NuGet Package Manager” of Visual Studio.

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