Brian L. Gorman - Practical Entity Framework Core 6: Database Access for Enterprise Applications

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Entity Framework is the object-relational mapper (ORM) of choice for a majority of enterprise application development teams which are leveraging Microsoft .Net technologies. Through the years, EF has gone through a number of changes, and the move into the .Net Core world has seen EF become more performant and more user-friendly.

As this book begins, well take a look at the state of things as they are and the state of things to come. Well begin the real work by touching on the two different approaches to working with a database using EFCore: database first and code first. After the first three chapters, we settle in on the code-first approach with EFCore and approach practical, real-world scenarios to help you and your team develop robust and rugged data solutions while learning the fundamental concepts necessary to effectively work with EFCore.

The great news is that no matter what approach to the database or version of EF you are using, with just a few minor exceptions, things will generally work in a similar fashion, so all of the information in this book is relevant to anyone working with Entity Framework.

Practical Entity Framework is written for anyone that is new to Entity Framework or is still learning and wants to become much better with Entity Framework.

If you are already an expert or a well-established developer with a few years of EF under your belt, this book will likely not have a lot of new information for you, but there may be a couple of concepts that you would still benefit from reviewing.

Overall, the book is designed as a practical approach which means that there is a lot of hands-on work to step through the moving pieces that are necessary to understand and work with EFCore, as well as how to approach architecting SOLID solutions around EFCore.

The practical nature of each activity will give you many examples and cover a lot of the basic and advanced topics you will likely encounter in real-world applications.

I would not have been able to write this book if it were not for a number of people who have both influenced and helped me throughout my career, as well as the multitudes of grace and support that I have received from my family throughout this process.

Id like to begin by thanking Andr van Meulebrouck for his excellent work as a technical reviewer and editor. Andrs thoughts and comments throughout the process have greatly helped to shape this book over the first and second editions. Also, his incredible patience with working through a couple of bugs with the solution files has been an invaluable resource to help ensure the resources work and the directions are easy to follow. An extra special thanks to Andr as well for consistently putting up with my misuse of setup vs. set up (you would think Id be better at this by now).

Id also like to thank the many friends and acquaintances Ive made at various tech conferences in the past few years. Ive learned so much from all of you. There are a few that I must mention, however. First, Mike Cole, my peer and friend, thank you for introducing me to AutoMapper projections, and thanks for all your candid conversations around Entity Framework (EF) with me as I wrote this book. Thanks to Mitchel Sellers for your talk on Entity Framework that I got to see at Iowa Code Camp and again at our CVINETA meeting a couple of years ago, which focused on addressing the performance pitfalls that arise from misusing Language Integrated Query (LINQ).

Thank you to Apress and the team who have believed in me and have helped to make this book possible. Thanks to Jonathan Gennick and Jill Balzano for running the project, editing, and overseeing the entire schedule and process.

I would be remiss if I didnt also thank Dustin Behn, the leader of the Inspired Nation, and his life coaching and his Emergence program. Thank you for coaching me these past few years and for helping me get out of my own way to do things like this book.

Last, and most importantly, to my wife Cassie and our kids, to whom the book is also dedicated. Thank you for giving me the time and space to make this book happen and for continually checking on my progress by asking how many chapters I have done and how many I have left.