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4 Experts List Favorite New EF Core 5.0 Features
Experts in the open source community surrounding Microsoft's recent EF Core 5.0 release have weighed in with their favorite new features in the object-database mapper for .NET.
Because EF Core 5.0 -- the modern, open source, cross-platform evolution of Entity Framework -- already went feature complete, there weren't many brand-new features for Microsoft to announce during last week's GA release along with:
[Click on image for larger view.] The EF Core CLI (RC version) (source: Microsoft).
It's also hard to summarize all of the cumulative changes, including:
So the dev team reached out to four pillars of the EF Core community and asked them to weigh in with their favorite new features. Here's a summary of what they had to say:
Simple Logging
Julie Lerman -- software coach, Pluralsight author and longtime user of Entity Framework:
"The LogTo method as a simple way to obtain logs while developing and debugging without installing additional dependencies."
Many-to-Many (M2M) Relationships
Diego Vega -- principal software engineer at Microsoft on the Azure networking team; former program manager for the EF Core team:
"I choose many-to-many because it comes with a payload of additional features."
ChangeTracker.Clear()
Jon P Smith -- .NET Core backend developer, architect and the author of "Entity Framework Core in Action":
"As with all EF Core releases, the team implements big features, but also many smaller usability improvements. The new DbContext.ChangeTracker.Clear() method is one of these improvements. It clears the EF change tracker so that all currently tracked entities are detached."
Improved Database-First Scaffolding
Erik Ejlskov Jensen -- Tech Lead at VENZO_nxt; maintainer of the popular EF Core Power Tools that provides reverse engineering, migrations and model visualization for EF Core:
"EF Core 5.0 includes many improvements for scaffolding (a.k.a. reverse-engineering) a DbContext for a database-first experience. These are features that can be both used from the command-line tools that ship with EF, or with community projects like Erik's visual EF Core Power Tools."
89K Downloads Per Day
The announcement post includes all of the above and much more in detail, and an exhaustive "what's new" page is also available.
As of this writing, the NuGet entry for EF Core 5.0 shows 110,688 downloads since its release eight days ago. Overall, EF Core has been downloaded 153,238,697 times, an average of 88,577 downloads per day.
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer for Converge360.