Tagged articles - Entity Framework Core

EF Core has migrations as a way of restoring the database structure inherited from Entity Framework and for the most of the cases all you have to do to setup your database structure changes when deploying your new application version is to call the Migrate method from your DbContext.Database property. It is not a perfect solution but as I mention, it works great for majority of the cases and takes of the complexity of sorting out order for execution of pending changes so you can focus on business logic of your application. ...read more

Using in-memory DbContext is a great way to mock your actual DbContext in unit tests. You basically initialize the instance of your DbContext and seed some random data before you assert the result of your repository method...read more

Caching data using Microsoft SQL Server may not be the most popular way of caching data because of the performance comparing to caching data to Redis, but it is maybe the most convenient way to keep your state of the application outside the process itself. Beside, if you are already using SQL Server database, you can just move the caching infrastructure to a separate schema inside the same database and keep using it until requirements are met for cache storage of better performance (like Redis for example). This makes infrastructure not so complex and less dependent, again until the requirements for something faster are met. ...read more

Since the time of ADO in .NET one of the limitations was that one connection can execute single command at the time. Same limitation Entity Framework inherited and you can execute single command at the time per instance of your DbContext...read more

It is not uncommon to have a requirement to access tables or views in different databases in the same query. In order to be able to do your joins on tables or views in different databases you need to do it in the same connection instance which is bound to DbContext, therefore this access as to be accomplished from the same DbContext instance...read more

As much as it is important for testing the functionality of the application, data seeding can also be used to pre-load some values like lookups not only to development and test environment but also to populate these values in production as well. Seeding of data can be done in several ways and in this article I will go through two ways of seeding data. Both of them have their pros and cons and it is up to you to pick the way you want to have your data pre-seeded in your application database. ...read more

Unit testing is an important part for maintaining code quality and what is the most important thing, avoiding bugs in production. This is one of the reasons why unit tests and high code coverage is desired as a part of the project and as a part of the build process since you can detect potential bugs and issues during the build process when unit tests are executed...read more

Tracing data changes can be beneficial in narrowing down the issue that may occur in production. If you are using Entity Framework Core you have several ways to store actions performed against your data...read more

Entity Framework Core implements optimistic concurrency strategy which is opposite to pessimistic concurrency strategy. Lets's first clear out what are main differences between these two approaches in concurrency control. Optimistic concurrency control allows multiple processes to access and modify data without any explicit lock on the data...read more

Recently I wrote about setting up .NET Core Identity Framework and Token based authentication in ASP.NET Core using symmetric key signing. The downside of this approach is that both identity and resource server share the same key for signing and validating the token...read more

In article Token based authentication and Identity framework in ASP.NET Core - Part 1 I described how to setup identity library for storing user accounts. Now we are going to setup ASP.NET Core Web API project to issue the token for authenticated users so they can access protected resources. Identity Web API instance will be separated from from the resource Web API, so we'll have eventually two and possibly in future more resource services which will all use single identity server fr authentication and issuing access tokens. ...read more

In ASP.NET Core identity framework is introduced as a membership provider making user management, authentication and authorization. It is built on to Entity Framework Core ORM which allows you to be storage type independent...read more

Unlike Entity Framework 6, EF Core and whole .NET Core relies on dependency injection. For example, configuration is expected to be injected from the calling assembly instead of being available at any time...read more