What's new in EF Core 6

2nd November 2021

I’m compiling information for our next Adelaide .NET User Group meetup which is focusing on the launch of .NET 6 and Visual Studio 2022.

EF Core 6 is the next version of Entity Framework - aka Entity Framework Core 6. Don’t confuse this with the old ‘Entity Framework 6’ (the one you might have used with legacy .NET Framework applications)!

In January 2021, the major themes planned for Entity Framework Core 6 were outlined:

Highly requested features
Performance
Migrations and deployment
Improve existing features and fix bugs
.NET integration
Experiments and investigations

The blog post went into a bit more detail under each of these headings as to what each might entail.

In addition, the plan for Entity Framework Core 6.0 is also published on Microsoft Docs.

Preview 1

UnicodeAttribute
PrecisionAttribute
EntityTypeConfigurationAttribute
Translate ToString on SQLite
EF.Functions.Random
Support for SQL Server sparse columns
In-memory database: validate required properties are not null
Improved SQL Server translation for IsNullOrWhitespace
Database comments are scaffolded to code comments
Microsoft.Data.Sqlite
- Savepoints API
- Command timeout in the connection string

Preview 2

Preserve synchronization context in SaveChangesAsync
Translate String.Concat with multiple arguments
Smoother integration with System.Linq.Async
More flexible free-text search

Preview 3

No blog post for this release. See GitHub issue list for actual changes included.

Preview 4

The runtime perf push
Pooling and recycling, DbContext and beyond
Logging suppression
Opting out of thread-safety checks

Preview 5

Compiled models dramatically reduce startup time for your application
The models are generated (similar to how migrations are) so they should be refreshed whenever your model changes.
Some features are not currently supported by compiled models, so be aware of the limitations when you try them out.