Visual Studio 2015 Preview and Entity Framework

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Today we are pleased to announce the availability of Visual Studio 2015 Preview. You can download it and read more about the release on the Visual Studio team blog.

This post details the places that Entity Framework is included in Visual Studio 2015 Preview. Our team is concurrently working on two versions of Entity Framework, both of which are included in this preview.

 

Entity Framework 6.1.2 (Beta 1)

This release includes Beta 1 of Entity Framework 6.1.2 runtime and tooling. EF6.1.2 includes a number bug fixes and community contributions, you can see a list of the changes included in EF6.1.2 on our CodePlex site.

The Entity Framework 6.1.2 runtime is included in a number of places in this release.

  • The runtime will be installed if you create a new model using the Entity Framework Tools in a project that does not already have the EF runtime installed.
  • The runtime is pre-installed in new ASP.NET projects, depending on the project template you select.

If you encounter any issues using this beta of the 6.1.2 release be sure to report them on our CodePlex site so that we can look at fixing them for RTM.

 

Entity Framework 7

EF7 is the next major version of Entity Framework and is still in the early stages of development.  EF7 is a lightweight and extensible version of EF that enables new platforms and new data stores.

You can find more detailed information about EF7 at https://aka.ms/AboutEF7. The page includes design information, links to relevant blog posts, and instruction about trying out the latest builds.

Visual Studio 2015 Preview includes a pre-release version of the EF7 runtime that is installed in new ASP.NET 5 projects.

Quality of EF7

We’d love to have you try out EF7 but just remember there are still a lot of rough edges and missing functionality. The EF7 project involves some major changes in the core of Entity Framework, you can read more about this in our recent ‘EF7 – v1 or v7?’ blog post.

This release is designed to give you an idea of what the experience will be like and you will quickly hit limitations if you deviate from the examples.

If you have a keen eye you may notice that the EF7 package is marked as ‘Beta 1’. This is a side effect of being part of a larger set of previews that are currently marked as Beta and we do not consider the EF7 code base to be at a level of quality or functionality where we would typically mark it as beta. This is just a result of the complexities of having a series of smaller autonomous products that are also involved in an all up release.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    November 17, 2014
    @Doron Grinzaig - We will be looking at a Document DB provider, it won't be our first priority for the initial release but we'll likely do some prototyping just to validate our overall design against this type of provider.

  • Anonymous
    November 26, 2014
    hi，Please look at this post as soon as possible, thank you social.microsoft.com/.../entitydatasource

  • Anonymous
    November 26, 2014
    @chonghanyu - This looks like a bug we are already tracking -  connect.microsoft.com/.../the-provider-did-not-return-a-providermanifest-instance-in-vs-2013-and-entityframework-6 The fix will ship in the next update to the .NET Framework

  • Anonymous
    December 04, 2014
    Is the goal to have EF 7 ready for VS 2015 RTM? I'm assuming so because you stated above it is already packaged in the ASP.NET 5 project template.

  • Anonymous
    December 05, 2014
    @Eric Weiss - Yes. This post has some important information about the scope of that release blogs.msdn.com/.../ef7-priorities-focus-and-initial-release.aspx.

  • Anonymous
    December 25, 2014
    I am very excited to check if Entity Designer "Update from DB" feature has new improvements like if the column was deleted, the EF class should update by itself and not like removing it manually?

  • Anonymous
    December 29, 2014
    @giovhan - No major changes in the designer in this release (just some minor bug fixes).

  • Anonymous
    January 03, 2015
    I heard EF7 will be a PCL and I'm excited to hear that. I'm interested in the part this will play specific to developing cross-platform mobile apps using Xamarin.

  1. Will EF7 PCL support iOS/Android local data stores whether thru external "providers" or directly by MS? That would be awesome!!
  2. To access data stores across HTTP, mobile devices usually call Web API/REST tier instead. For that, we have HttpClient today, already supported in PCL. Will EF7 have something better for mobile devices in terms of accessing data stores across the network?
  3. In addition to direct support for cloud-based Azure storage from mobile devices, is it possible to have EF7 "providers" jump in and write their code to support access to non-MS cloud storage like S3 or RDS from Amazon?

  • Anonymous
    January 05, 2015
    @samdevx - Yes we are working towards Xamarin support (but it doesn't work just yet). #1 - Our team is working on a SQLite provider that we will light up on iOS/Andriod when we get the rest of the stack up and running on those platforms. #2 - We aren't doing anything specifically in this area. We are working on an Azure Table Storage provider that builds on the Azure Storage SDK which in turn uses HTTP services... so the general pattern is something that can be used with EF7. #3 - These kind of providers would definitely be possible with EF7. Our team isn't working on any of them at the moment (and don't have any plans to in the immediate future). They would be a great candidate for an external project or a provider writer though.

  • Anonymous
    February 12, 2015
    One interesting feature to include into the edmx designer would be an entity type and property editor which allows adding custom attribute annotations right through the property grid editor. Like the Documentation property, add a property called say Annotation that would let us accomplish such simple by handy stuff...

  • Anonymous
    July 17, 2015
    How do you configure the new project.json file to include a specific ADO.NET provider? I'm trying to get Oracle 12c to work with Entity Framework 6.1.3. I get the following error; "Unable to determine the provider name for provider factory of type 'Oracle.ManagedDataAccess.Client.OracleClientFactory'. Make sure that the ADO.NET provider is installed or registered in the application config."

  • Anonymous
    August 06, 2015
    I get same issue as Fosol, Unable to determine the provider name for provider factory ... - in my case trying to use MySQL

  • Anonymous
    October 19, 2015
    @Fosol & @  radams0x – Are you using a NuGet package to get the Oracle ADO.NET implementation? If so, I suspect that package uses an install script to add the config for the oracle provider to the config file… but install scripts and web.config are not supported on ASP.NET 5. You probably need to manually register the provider factory using machine.config.

  • Anonymous
    November 25, 2015
    Hi Rowan, Does EF7 support multiple resultset from stored proc? In earlier versions, we had objectContext.Translate for converting multiple resultset into entities. Since Object context has been removed, do we have any work around to achieve the same functionality? Thanks, Valliappan

  • Anonymous
    November 30, 2015
    @Anusha Muthiah - No, not at this stage. This would be a reason to stay on EF6.x for the time being if your application makes use of stored procedures.