Entity framework is an ORM (Object Relational Mapper) tool for .NET developers. It supports multiple relational databases including SQL Server, MySQL, SqlLite, Postgress, Oracle and others. All of the data providers of EF are open sourced. The current version of Entity Framework is 6.1.3.
In this article, Rowan Miller, program manager in the Entity Framework team at Microsoft. He works on both Entity Framework and the new Entity Framework Core.
Some of the topics Rowan covers in this video:
- Why use Entity Framework
- EF saves you time and writes data layer classes for you. But it comes with an overhead and performance is slower than ADO.NET.
- Why choose Dapper, NHibernate, Entity Framework, and ADO.NET
- What is the difference between Entity Framework 6.x and Entity Framework Core
- EF 6.x runs on full .NET Framework while EF Core is a light-weight and runs on smaller subset of libraries on multiple platforms
- EF 6.x is a Windows technology but EF Core can work where .NET Core can
Watch this video for more details:
EF 7 is the next version of EF. Here is another video, that talks about the future of EF 7.