Microsoft’s Entity Framework is an Object Relational Mapping (ORM) framework for ADO.NET. Let’s go through an example of how to use Entity Framework.
First, we will create a new Console application project:
Go to Manage NuGet Packages for Solution:
And select EntityFramework:
Select the project and Install:
Click OK and Accept:
You will see the following messages:
Once complete, you will see these new references in your project:
We can now connect this to our database and write some code. We have a database WideWorldImporters that we can connect to.
Select Add New Item:
Select Data and then ADO.NET Entity Data Model. We will call our model WideWorldEF:
Here we have different options for our model contents:
Select the first option and click Next.
Now we select the data connection:
Click Next:
Now we can select our Database Objects and Settings. You can see how this matches to our database:
We will select the Customers table:
Click Finish. You will now see the model loaded into your environment.
You can now use the code below to print each customer to the console app:
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
namespace Carl.EntityFramework.Sample1
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
WideWorldImportersEntities db = new WideWorldImportersEntities();
var query = from cust in db.Customers
select cust;
List<Customer> custList = query.ToList();
foreach (Customer c in custList)
{
Console.WriteLine(c.CustomerName);
}
Console.ReadLine();
}
}
}
You can see how simplified it is to connect to the database and perform a read operation. You can also easily perform CRUD operations.
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