Code, the Universe and everything…

While Entity Framework Core along with ASP.NET Core get all the hype today, Entity Framework 6 is still the workhorse of many applications running every day which won’t be converted to the Core world anytime soon, if at all. Because of this I decided to spend some time to give my EF extensions a small refresh to adapt to the changing landscape.

Github

Some of my extensions were hosted on Codeplex. I do most of the work on Github these days and Github is nowadays a de facto standard for open source projects. Codeplex not only looks dated but is also missing a lot of features Github has (searching the code on Github is far from perfect but Codeplex does not offer it at all). All in all this turned out to be the right decision given that it was recently announced that Codeplex is being shutdown. Anyways, here is where my projects previously hosted on Codeplex found their new homes:

• EFCache (2nd Level Cache for Entity Framework)
• CodeFirstFunctions (Store Functions for Entity Framework)
• EFInteractiveViews (Interactive Pre-generated Views for Entity Framework)

Updating projects

I developed most of my EF extensions before Visual Studio 2015 was released. I found that opening them in Visual Studio 2015 was not a good experience – Visual Studio would update project/solution files automatically leaving unwanted changes. Therefore, I updated solution files to the version compatible with Visual Studio 2015. I also moved to a newer version of XUnit which does not require installing an XUnit runner extension in Visual Studio to enable running tests. Even though the solution files are marked as Visual Studio 2015 compatible they can be opened just fine with Visual Studio 2017 which shipped in the meantime.

New versions

This is probably the most exciting: I released new versions of a few of my extensions.

2nd Level Cache for Entity Framework

2nd Level Cache (a.k.a. EFCache) 1.1.0 contains only one new feature. This feature will, however, make everyone’s life easier. Until now the default caching policy cached results for all queries. In the vast majority of cases this behavior is not desired (or plainly incorrect) so you had to create your own policy to limit caching only to results from selected tables. In EFCache 1.1.0 you can specify store entity sets (i.e. which correspond to tables in the database) for which the results should be cached when creating the default caching policy. As a result you no longer have to create your own policy if you want to control simple caching. This change is not breaking.

Store Functions for Entity Framework

I received a couple of community Pull Requests which are worth sharing so yesterday I published on NuGet the new new version of the Store Functions for Entity Framework (1.1.0) containing these contributions. pogi-b added support for Built-in functions so you can now map built-in store functions (e.g. FORMAT or MAP) and use them in your queries. PaulVrugt added ability to discover function stubs marked as private. The first change is not breaking. If you happened to have private function stubs that were not discovered before (a.k.a. dead code) they will be discovered now as a result of the second change.

EF6 CodeFirst View Generation T4 Template for C#

Visual Studio 2017 now requires extensions to use VSIX v3 format. The EF6 CodeFirst View Generation T4 Template for C# extension used format v1 and could not be installed in Visual Studio 2017. I updated the VSIX format to v3 and dropped support for Visual Studio 2010 and 2012.

Note: I have not updated other view generation templates for EF4/EF5 to work with Visual Studio 2017. If you need them to work with VS 2017 let me know and I will update.

Happy Easter!