Programming Entity Framework: DbContext

Chapter 9. What’s Coming Next for Entity Framework

So far, this book has walked through all the DbContext API functionality that was available at the time of writing. The companion to this book, Programming Entity Framework: Code First, covers the remainder of the functionality that was available in the EntityFramework NuGet package at the time of writing. However, there are some notable features that will soon be available for preview.

The Entity Framework team has indicated that they are about to release Entity Framework 5.0 (EF 5.0), which will include some long-awaited features, including support for enum properties and spatial data.

Understanding Entity Framework’s Version Numbers

Historically, Entity Framework releases have been strongly tied to .NET Framework releases. The first version of Entity Framework shipped with .NET 3.5 SP1. The second release was included in .NET 4 and was named Entity Framework 4 (EF 4), to align with the .NET version. The DbContext API and Code First were released out-of-band of the .NET Framework as EF 4.1. This number was chosen to indicate that it was a small update that built on the functionality in .NET 4.

When the time came to ship bug fixes for EF 4.1, the team released EF 4.1 Update 1. This release, and some other releases from Microsoft, caused some confusion in the community about how releases are versioned. Based on this feedback, the Entity Framework team has now adopted semantic versioning for its releases. You can read more about semantic ...