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Release Candidates Out for Entity Framework Core 3.0 and Entity Framework 6.3
After shipping Preview 9 versions of Entity Framework Core 3.0 and Entity Framework 6.3 a couple weeks ago and saying, "These are the last planned previews before we release the final versions later this month," Microsoft belied that with new Release Candidate builds.
"We previously said that preview 9 would be your last chance to test EF Core 3.0 and EF 6.3 before general availability," said Diego Vega, program manager for .NET Data Access, in a Sept. 16 blog post. "But it turns out that we made enough improvements to our libraries and across the whole of .NET Core 3.0 to justify publishing a release candidate build. Hence the packages for EF Core 3.0 RC1 and EF 6.3 RC1 were uploaded to nuget.org today."
EF Core represents the company's new modular, open source, cross-platform direction for data-centric ORM development, while EF 6.3 was separated out from the traditional Windows-only .NET Framework as a distinct offering.
"While Entity Framework Core was built from the ground up to work on .NET Core, 6.3 will be the first version of EF 6 that can run on .NET Core and work cross-platform," Vega explained earlier this year. "In fact, the main goal of this release is to facilitate migrating existing applications that use EF 6 to .NET Core 3.0."
This week, Vega advised developers to consider daily builds to try out the latest updates to the two products, because, "Although RC1 builds contain several improvements, we took several more critical bug fixes after the RC1 branch was created."
Daily builds will ensure developers aren't hitting an issue that has already been fixed.
Two of those aforementioned improvements that developers may want to verify, Vega said, are:
- Work on the EF Core in-memory provider was finished and most query features should now be working (the majority of it went into RC1)
- EF Core's compilation performance was improved significantly for complex queries
For those unfamiliar with the two EF offerings, the company explains the difference between them thusly:
- Entity Framework 6 (EF6) is a tried and tested object-relational mapper (O/RM) for .NET with many years of feature development and stabilization.
- Entity Framework (EF) Core is a lightweight, extensible, open source and cross-platform version of the popular Entity Framework data access technology.
As .NET Core 3.0 and the associated EF offerings will ship Sept. 23 during the virtual .NET Conf, Vega's team is focusing on updating documentation for the latest version and working on the next 3.1 release planned for November. Any new bugs found will almost certainly be addressed in that update as the team wraps up v3.0.
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.