Entity Framework 5.0 Brings Better Performance, Features

The Entity Framework (EF) 5.0, the latest version of Microsoft’s object-relational mapping (ORM) system, was released in Aug. 2012. The upgrade provides performance improvements and feature enhancements to the Framework and its designer tool that runs within Visual Studio (VS). The new version gives developers more flexible coding capabilities when using the EF and could help them build more responsive applications and improve the performance of existing applications without changing code. However, some of the enhancements require the .NET Framework 4.5, which in turn requires an upgrade to VS 2012.

Performance Improved, Features Added

The EF, part of the ADO.NET data access technologies of the .NET Framework, is a set of developer tools and runtime components that map application components that store and manipulate data to corresponding tables in a database management system, such as Microsoft’s SQL Server. Data access code is often repetitive and thus tedious to write, and changes to the database’s design (for example, introducing a new table of work site addresses in a human resources database) might require developers to manually update data access code, which can be a time-consuming and error-prone process. The EF is designed to reduce the amount of data access code that a developer has to write and to simplify code maintenance in response to database design changes.