EfCoreInAction

Welcome to the Git repo that is associated with the book Entity Framework Core in Action published by Manning Publications. This book details how to use Entity Framework Core (EF Core) to develop database access code in .NET Core applications.

This Git repo contains all the code in the book, plus an example book selling site that I develop, and improve, in the book. All the code uses Microsoft's, open-source Entity Framework Core library for database access.

NOTE: Code uses .NET Core 2.0, with a few branches converted to .NET Core 2.1
See Where's the code.

To run the changed Git repo code you need to:

1. Install .NET Core 2.0 SDK – go to https://www.microsoft.com/net/download/core and select the correct SDK for your system
2. I recommend updating to Visual Studio 2017 15.3 or later as that has the new templates for ASP.NET Core 2.0.0. Or use Visual Studio code (the code is designed to work with either VS2017 or VSCode)

Where's the code!

This repo has a branch-per-chapter, and sometime and branch-per-section, approach so if you are looking at the master branch then you won't see any code! Just click the Branches on the site and you will find all the branches I have created so far.

Map of the branches

The branches mainly inherit from each other (shown as --> in the diagram) but a few are on there own, like master and Chapter01 (shown with spaces between them). The ones that are build for deployment to a web site are branches off the main stem (shown as higher offshoots). I did that because I built the normal code so you can run it locally without migrations.
Note: to fit the diagram in I shorten the real branch names and use Ch4 instead of Chapter04

Part 1 - Getting started

                                        Ch5Migrate
                                          /
master    Ch1    Ch2 --> Ch3 --> Ch4 --> Ch5 -->

Part 2 - Entity Framework in depth

(ch5) --> Ch6 --> Ch7 --> Ch8 --> Ch9

Part 3 - Using Entity Framework in real-world applications

                                           Ch13-Part3
                                              /
                                        Ch13-Part2    Ch14MySql
                                            /         /
(ch9) --> Ch10 --> Ch11 --> Ch12 --> Ch13-Part1 --> Ch14  --> (Ch15) Note1

Note1: Chapter 15, on unit testing has its own Git repo https://github.com/JonPSmith/EfCore.TestSupport and a NuGet package called EfCore.TestSupport.

NET Core 2.1 examples

I wanted to compare the performance of EF Core 2.0 and EF Core 2.1, so I created a few new branches. Here is the list:

• Chapter05-NetCore21
• Chapter13-Part1-NetCore21
• Chapter13-Part2-NetCore21

NET Core 3 examples

To support EF Core 3 I created new branches. They are there to help you if you want to work with EF Core 3. I also used the Chapter13-Part3-NetCore3 branch to find all the changes between EF Core 2 and EF Core 3 (the unit tests are very helpful for that). Here is the list:

• Chapter01-NetCore3
• Chapter05-NetCore3
• Chapter13-Part3-NetCore3

Live example book selling site

You can find a live verison of the example books selling site. This provides an online example of the site to look at. You can't edit the data on the live site for obvious reasons, but you can if you clone the git this Git repo and run the example application locally. You can 'buy a book' though on the live site, and even see your old 'purchases'.

The Logs navigation button will show you the SQL code that EF Core used to implement the last command you used.

Note: The admin button is missing on the live site.

Database naming conventions

Because the database structure can change in each branch I use a system of building the database name using the branch name from a file which is written by a small gulpfile that is run by Visual Studio # on every build.

Also I use xUnit unit tests which run in parallel, so I cannot use one database for all the tests, as they would all be changing the database at one time. I therefore use another system to append the test class name, and sometimes the method that ran. This is all explained in chapter 11, but I wanted to warn you you will get lots of databases if you run the unit tests.

If you get fed up with all databases there is a unit test in test/UnitCommands/DeleteAllUnitTestDatabases that will delete all the unit test databases in the branch you are in.

Licence

MIT

Other links

My twitter handle is @thereformedprog.
My blog site is at http://www.thereformedprogrammer.net/ where you will find articles on EF 6.x and some on EF Core.

Happy coding!