Tag Archives: EntityFramework

Quick Start EF Core Videos on Channel 9

Data Access, , , ,

My Pluralsight course, Entity Framework Core: Getting Started, is a pretty thorough exploration for learning about EF Core. But at 5 hours, it may not be the VERY first thing you want to look at. So I’ve created some 12 minute videos on Channel 9 that will, in that very short time, walk you through building some tiny apps that use EF Core so you can get your hands dirty. While you won’t learn much in the way of ins & outs, they will walk you through:

  • creating a new app from scratch,
  • adding in a domain class
  • add in EF Core
  • creating an EF Core data model
  • creating a database from the model
  • creating and saving some data
  • reading, updating and modifying some data.

That’s a lot for 12 minutes, but I have done it in a way that you can just watch and learn, or follow along to build the apps yourself . For some of the code that is not related to the EF Core lesson, you can even copy that code from my GitHub account and paste it into your solution.

There are currently 2 videos.

EF Core in a Full .NET Application Using Visual Studio 2015
This one is designed to assure you that you can use EF Core in a full .NET application and using totally familiar tools. You’ll build a little .NET console app that uses EF Core to read and write some movie data.

EFCoreQS1Lerman_512 2017-03-22_18-21-35

EF Core in an ASP.NET Core Application Using Visual Studio 2017
This video will give you the full leading edge .NET Core experience as you use the brand new Visual Studio 2017 to create a tiny ASP.NET Core MVC App that uses EF Core to interact with the data. Again, some of the code that is not about EF Core is available to copy/paste from my GitHub account, making it easy to follow along with the demo.EFCoreQS2Lerman_512

2017-03-22_18-19-44

I’ll be adding anther one showing  Creating an ASP.NET Core App with EF Core Using Visual Studio Code in OS X . You can keep an eye on my Channel 9 Niners page or this blog to see what that gets published.

When your ready to really learn about EF Core, head over to Pluralsight for my Entity Framework Core: Getting Started Course. If you don’t have a subscription, contact me for a 30-day free trial code.

2017-03-22_18-35-49

EF Core Lets Us Finally Define NoTracking DbContexts

Data Access, , , ,

Way back in 2012, I added a feature request to EF6 to allow us to define a context that will never track entities that it retrieves from the database.

(Support Read-Only Context or DbSet)

This is instead of having to add AsNoTracking to all of your queries if you have a DbContext you are using for read-only data. Or more importantly, if your DbContext is being used for data that’s going to be disconnected and therefore never tracked post-query. That means a Web API or service or a controller. Tracking can be expensive if you are retrieving a lot of data and have no plans to update it. And having to remember to add AsNoTracking to every query is a PIA.

I just discovered that this is possible with EF Core and I think it was even in the EF Core 1.0 release!

There is a ChangeTracker property called QueryTrackingBehavior that takes a QueryTrackingBehavior enum whose options are NoTracking and TrackAll.

There are plenty of places to use it, but the one I’m excited about is to place it directly in the constructor of a DbContext to make that context default to never track any entities.

public class BookContext : DbContext
{
  public BooksReadOnlyContext() { 
    ChangeTracker.QueryTrackingBehavior = 
       QueryTrackingBehavior.NoTracking;
  }
 public DbSet<Book> Books {get;set;}
 etc ...

A quick test where I retrieved some books and the inspected the ChangeTracker.Entries returned 0, to show that this was doing what I’ve been dreaming of for over 5 years! Thanks EF team!

 Console.WriteLine(
   $"Tracked Entities: {context.ChangeTracker.Entries().Count()}");

Another point to be aware of is that just as you have always been able to use the DbSet’s AsNoTracking method to turn off tracking for a particular query, you can now use AsTracking to turn on tracking for a particular query.