Learning .NET High-performance Programming

An overview of Entity Framework

First released in 2008, EF has improved heavily during the four major releases deployed over the last 5 years. At the time of writing, the stable release is the Version 6.x and has the ability to connect to any relational database with three main connection architectures: database-first, model-first, and code-first. The first two are similar, except for the need to connect to an already-existing database or creating one with EF itself. Code-first, instead, is a completely new approach to access and maintain a database structure during application's lifetime. This relies on classes and a lot of decorator pattern (attributes) to specify physical names, constraints, and types. This design, together with the classical ...