What is Entity Framework Core?

Most nontrivial web applications need to reliably run operations on data, such as create, read, update, and delete (CRUD). They also need to persist any changes made by these operations between application restarts. Although there are various options for persisting data in .NET applications, Entity Framework (EF) Core is a user-friendly solution and a great fit for many .NET applications.

Understand EF Core

EF Core is a lightweight, extensible, open source, and cross-platform data access technology for .NET applications.

EF Core can serve as an object-relational mapper, which:

• Enables .NET developers to work with a database by using .NET objects.
• Eliminates the need for most of the data-access code that typically needs to be written.

EF Core supports a large number of popular databases, including SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server.

The model

With EF Core, data access is performed by using a model. A model is made up of entity classes and a context object that represents a session with the database. The context object allows querying and saving data.

The entity class

In this scenario, you’re implementing a pizza store management API, so you use a Pizza entity class. The pizzas in your store have a name and a description. They also need an ID to allow the API and database to identify them. The Pizza entity class that you use in your application identifies pizzas:

C#Copy

namespace PizzaStore.Models 
{
  public class Pizza
  {
      public int Id { get; set; }
      public string? Name { get; set; }
      public string? Description { get; set; }
  }
}

about