Entity Framework 6: New Features

In this blog post you will see the list of cool things available with Entity Framework 6. Entity Framework is Microsoft's recommended data access technology for new applications. EF team recently announced the release of EF6 and it is now available for download on NuGet. EF6 comes with number of features and performance improvements, I have listed some of them below and I will cover most of the cool things of EF6 in coming blog posts.

Features for models created with Code First and EF Designer

Async Query and Save adds support for the task-based asynchronous patterns that were introduced in .NET 4.5. With .NET 4.5 Microsoft introduced async and await keywords but in EF 5 Microsoft didn't have time to add support for async query and save but now with EF6 it is supported.

Connection Resiliency enables automatic recovery from transient connection failures.

Code-Based Configuration gives you the option of performing configuration - that was traditionally performed in a config file - in code.

Dependency Resolution introduces support for the Service Locator pattern and we've factored out some pieces of functionality that can be replaced with custom implementations.

Interception/SQL logging provides low-level building blocks for interception of EF operations with simple SQL logging built on top.

DbContext can now be created with a DbConnection that is already opened which enables scenarios where it would be helpful if the connection could be open when creating the context (such as sharing a connection between components where you cannot guarantee the state of the connection).

And much more.

Features for code first only

Custom Code First Conventions allow write your own conventions to help avoid repetitive configuration. We provide a simple API for lightweight conventions as well as some more complex building blocks to allow you to author more complicated conventions.

Code First Mapping to Insert/Update/Delete Stored Procedures is now supported.

Idempotent migrations scripts allow you to generate a SQL script that can upgrade a database at any version up to the latest version.

Configurable Migrations History Table allows you to customize the definition of the migrations history table. This is particularly useful for database providers that require the appropriate data types etc. to be specified for the Migrations History table to work correctly. We’ve created a feature specification for this feature.

Multiple Contexts per Database removes the previous limitation of one Code First model per database when using Migrations or when Code First automatically created the database for you. We’ve created a feature specification for this feature.

And much more.

In my upcoming blog posts, I will be talking about most of the features one by one.

Hope this helps.