Entity Framework Core 5 support in Entity Developer and dotConnect Providers

Devart is glad to announce the release of Entity Developer 6.10 and the new versions of dotConnect ADO.NET data providers for Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite. New versions of Devart products support Entity Framework Core 5.0 and its new features. Besides, there are certain breaking changes regarding dotConnect assemblies with Entity Framework Core functionality. These changes must be taken into account when you update your projects, working with Entity Framework Core 2.

Entity Framework Core 5.0 Support

New versions of our ADO.NET providers and Entity Developer fully support Entity Framework Core 5.0 and its new, long awaited features: table-per-type inheritances and many-to-many associations.

Entity Developer can now detect many-to-many associations and table-per-type inheritances automatically when generating an Entity Framework Core 5.0 model from a database. You can also create these inheritances and associations manually via the corresponding editors or Model Refactoring Wizard.

Standalone Entity Developer application now targets Entity Framework Core 5.0 by default, when creating new Entity Framework Core models. You can select another version in the Create Model Wizard, when creating the model.

Assembly Changes

New versions of dotConnect for Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite introduce significant changes to their Devart.Data.***.EFCore NuGet packages. These packages previously contained the corresponding Devart.Data.***.Entity.EFCore.dll assemblies for different Entity Framework Core versions:

• EF Core 1 assembly (.NET Standard 1.3)
• EF Core 2 assembly (.NET Standard 2.0)
• EF Core 3 assembly (.NET Standard 2.1)

Now the assemblies and their .NET Standard compatibility changed in these packages. They now contain assemblies for the following Entity Framework Core versions:

• EF Core 1 assembly (.NET Standard 1.3)
• EF Core 3 assembly (.NET Standard 2.0)
• EF Core 5 assembly (.NET Standard 2.1)

Note that these packages don’t contain an assembly for Entity Framework Core 2 anymore. This assembly is now available only via the installer of the corresponding dotConnect provider. It installs the assembly into \Entity\EFCore2\netstandard2.0\ subfolder of the provider installation folder.

This means that if you used this NuGet package in your project, using Entity Framework Core 2, the project will be automatically upgraded to Entity Framework Core 3 when updating our NuGet package. Note that there are breaking changes between Entity Framework Core 2 and 3. And if your project used Entity Framework Core 3, it will be upgraded to Entity Framework Core 5.

If you want to stay on Entity Framework Core 2, you need to do the following things:

1. Delete the Devart.Data.***.EFCore package from your project
2. Add the Devart.Data.*** package instead.
3. Add the Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Relational package of version 2.2.6 to your project.
4. Add the \Entity\EFCore2\netstandard2.0\Devart.Data.***.Entity.EFCore.dll assembly from the provider installation folder to your project.

If you want to stay on Entity Framework Core 3, you need to switch the Target framework of your project to one of the following:

• .NET Core 2.x
• .NET Standard 2.0
• .NET Framework 4.6.1 or higher

List of Providers with Entity Framework Core 5 Support