Entity Framework is an object-relational mapper (aka ORM) that enables .NET developers to work with various databases using a common set of .NET objects. The main benefit with ORMs in general is the reduction in the amount of plumbing code required to connect and interact with the database.
As a part of the Visual Studio tooling, Entity Framework supported mode- first and database-first approaches that relied on the Entity Framework Designer. Both of these approaches stored the data model in an EDMX file; a xml based format for representing database models.
With Entity Framework Core, the recommended and supported way for creating database models for your applications is using the code first approach. If you're migrating your project from Entity Framework to Entity Framework Core you'll have to convert your EDMX based models over to use code first instead.
Entity Framework 6.3 is supported on .NET Core 3.0, and it also supports the code first approach. You can read more about that here.
In this episode, Entity Framework PM Diego Vega joins Christos to give us a through walkthrough of porting an Entity Framework EDMX model over to Entity Framework Core.
If you liked this video and would like to see some more of our .NET content, please subscribe to our .NET Developers YouTube Channel.
Top comments (1)
Something to be aware of as well is the free and open-sourced Entity Framework Visual Editor, where you can consume an EF6 assembly, automatically creating the visual model, then re-target to EF Core to generate a code-first set of files.
Full disclosure statement: I'm its author.