Wrap Up!

We have come to the end of the course. Below is a review of what we’ve learned.

Course recap

We started the course by discussing the benefits of EF Core, its features, and how it enables developers to interact seamlessly with relational databases.

Then, we reviewed one of the workflows of Entity Framework, which is reverse engineering or a Database First workflow. We saw that it is a valuable tool when we want the database schema to be the source of truth.

Next, we went on to the second workflow of Entity Framework, which is a Code First workflow. This workflow uses migrations to keep the database schema in sync with the model as development progresses. This workflow brings other capabilities like SQL script generation and data seeding.

Then, we dived deeper as we reviewed how to configure a model. We discussed the conventions EF Core follows when building a model. We saw how to supplement those conventions through data annotations or the fluent API.

Still in model configuration, we saw how to configure relationships between entities, the role of foreign keys, and navigational properties in relationships.

Moving forward, we delved into the main aspect of Entity Framework—querying data using LINQ. Entity Framework leverages LINQ’s ability to query multiple data sources. Therefore, we can use similar query expressions to query data from different data sources. Using LINQ allows us to filter, order, group, and perform many query operations.

After that, we reviewed saving data. We saw how to add, update, and delete data. We reviewed the different states an entity can be in and how the ChangeTracker of Entity Framework utilizes this state when saving data.

Next, we reviewed logging, which allows us to obtain information about the queries we execute. Finally, we saw two methods for testing with Entity Framework: testing with SQLite, and testing with the repository pattern.

Congratulations!

Thank you for sticking with us until the end! This course was an introduction to Entity Framework Core. We hope we met your expectations.

Feedback

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