EF Basic 1 : Introduction

Basics of Entity Framework

You will the learn basics of Entity Framework using step by step tutorials in this section. We will use Entity Framework 6.0 and Visual Studio 2012 for all the basic tutorials covered in this section.

The following table lists all the important versions of Entity Framework.

EF Version	Introduced Features
EF 3.5	Basic O/RM support with Database First approach.
EF 4.0	POCO Support, Lazy loading, testability improvements, customizable code generation and the Model First approach.
EF 4.1	First to available in the NuGet, Simplified DBContext API over ObjectContext, Code First approach. EF 4.1.1 patch released with bug fixing of 4.1.
EF 4.3	Code First Migrations feature that allows a database created by Code First to be incrementally changed as your Code First model evolves. EF 4.3.1 patch released with bug fixing of EF 4.3.
EF 5.0	Announced EF as Open Source. Introduced Enum support, table-valued functions, spatial data types, multiple-diagrams per model, coloring of shapes on the design surface and batch import of stored procedures, EF Power Tools and various performance improvements.
EF 6.0 - Current release	EF 6.0/6.1 is the latest release of Entity Framework. It includes many new features related to Code First & EF designer like asynchronous query & save, connection Resiliency, dependency resolution etc.

Visit MSDN for detailed information on EntityFramework Version History.

Visit Code-First Tutorial to learn about EF code-first model from scratch.

Prerequisites: Basic knowledge of .Net Framework, C#, Visual Studio and MS SQL Server is required.

Audience: Basic tutorials are helpful for anyone who doesn't know anything about Entity Framework and would like to learn it from scratch.