With the .NET 5 release comes the newest Entity Framework Core version, unsurprisingly called Entity Framework Core 5 (EF Core 5). The .NET community got its first glimpse of Entity Framework (EF) on August 11th, 2008, with the release of .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1. Let’s say a few things have changed since the initial release. For those unfamiliar with the technology, Entity Framework is an object-relational mapper (ORM), helping developers overcome the impedance mismatches between C# and a database instance’s schema.
Entity Framework has come a long way since its original inception. Conceived initially as a designer-centric tool heavily reliant on Visual Studio’s graphical user interface and SQL Server, EF’s current philosophy recognizes the need to be friendlier to ideas like distributed source-control, build servers, multiple database engines, and operating systems.
In this post, we’ll see how we can get started with EF Core 5. We’ll design a schema for entertainment productions using a code-first approach, migrate an SQLite database to our schema’s current incarnation, seed our database, and run some typical LINQ queries.