Monday, May 12, 2014

Entity Framework ”reboot” – EF7 – Get a sneak peek via TechEd US live stream

The next version of Entity Framework has just been named “EF7” (code name EF EveryWhere). Before the presentation, which will be streamed live on Channel 9 during TechEd US on Wednesday May 14 at 1:30 PM CDT (Houston, Texas), allow me to summarize what we know so far about the next version of Entity Framework.

The Entity Framework team has already published some thoughts about the new Framework here, and based on this and other sources, we can summarize the following (some or maybe most of which is me guessing, of course):

- A completely new codebase, will not be based on the 1 million+ line codebase of EF6

- Will be open source, and accept pull requests and other community feedback

- Will support Windows Phone, Windows Store, Windows Desktop/Server/Cloud, and also support Mono/Xamarin platforms

- Will be based on a provider model, so SQL and NoSQL data sources can “plug in”. Will initially support SQLite on Phone and Store apps. Will also support SQL Server and Azure Table Storage

- Will only include a productive subset of the current, huge API – Code First Mappings, DbContext, POCO classes, and less mapping schemes. So current investments in DbContext, Code First/Second and POCO will be forward reusable.

- Will not contain ObjectContext, Entity SQL, EntityConnection, EntityCommand etc. Phew.

Sounds ambitious and great to me. Can’t wait to see some code and start playing!

UPDATE: The source code is now available on Github as part of ASP.NET vNext. And Rowan Miller, Program Manager on the EF team speaks about and demonstrates EF7 in this TechEd session available online.

5 comments:

Freman said...

Are you seriously pretending to drop any ModelFirst/DatabaseFirst support from EF7? Or, did I get it wrong???

ErikEJ said...

I do not Work on the team, I am just a developer. But I would imagine that you can do Code Second workflows with EF7 just like today

Freman said...

I'm sorry, Erik. I know you're a contributor, so I thought you could have first-hand information on this. I'm concerned because CodeFirst, currently, lacks so many features. I'll keep an eye on this.

Unknown said...

Greate post, Erik.
Wow, I just today posted about EF7 (I'm a lazy kid). I think you are the first person :p

neoaisac said...

I might be saying stupid things but... does it make any sense to call it Entity Framework 7 then? It is an entirely new product with sufficient backwards incompatibilities to break the code of everyone that tries to upgrade once it is released!

In any case it is still good news!