Plan for Entity Framework Core 8 (EF8)

[ajcvickers]

Today we are excited to share with you the plan for Entity Framework Core 8. This issue contains a quick summary of the plan and acts as a place for you to leave feedback.

This plan brings together input from many stakeholders and outlines where and how we intend to invest in Entity Framework Core 8 (EF Core 8; EF8)

IMPORTANT
This plan is not a commitment; it will evolve as we continue to learn throughout the release. Some things not currently planned for EF8 may get pulled in. Some things currently planned for EF8 may get punted out.

General information

EF Core 8 is the next release after EF Core 7 and is scheduled to ship in November 2023, at the same time as .NET 8. EF8 currently targets .NET 6. This will likely be updated to .NET 8 as we near the release date. EF8 will align with .NET 8 as a long-term support (LTS) release. See the .NET support policy for more information.

Themes

Large investments for EF8 and data access in .NET 8 fall under the following themes:

Highly requested features

• JSON columns
  Build on EF7 JSON support to further power the document/relational hybrid pattern.
• Value objects
  Applications can use DDD-style value objects in EF models.
• SQL queries for unmapped types
  Applications can execute more types of SQL query without dropping down to ADO.NET or using third-party libraries.

Cloud native and devices

• AOT and trimming with EF Core
  Small, fast-starting EF Core applications with no dynamic code generation.
• AOT and trimming for ADO.NET
  Low-level data access can be used in cloud native applications.

Performance

• Woodstar
  Fast, fully managed access to SQL Server and Azure SQL for .NET applications.

Visual Tooling

• First-class T4 templates in Visual Studio
  Leverage T4 templating across multiple areas in Visual Studio.
• EF Core Database First in Visual Studio
  Out-of-the-box Database First tooling in Visual Studio.

Developer experience

• Make EF Core better
  Improve the developer experience be making many small improvements to EF Core

Find out more and give feedback

This post is a brief summary of the full EF8 plan. Please see the full plan for more information.

Your feedback on planning is important. The best way to indicate the importance of an issue is to vote (👍) for that issue on GitHub. This data will then feed into the planning process for the next release.

In addition, please comment on this issue if you believe we are missing something that is critical for EF8, or are focusing on the wrong areas.

[ErikEJ]

When will you open source Woodstar? Or at least share the code.

[ajcvickers]

@ErikEJ As soon as possible. We're not holding it back for any particular reason, and I imagine @roji will share something pretty soon after he starts working on it.

[ErikEJ]

Great. For some reason I was under the impression that @smitpatel had done a lot already..

[roji]

@ErikEJ yeah, there's already some considerable done, but not yet done... Once we have something that works and is in a state to make public, we'll definitely do that.

[davidroth]

To increase usefulness of DDD aggregate mapping via owned (collection) types, the owned inheritance issue would be really important: #9630 😀

But yeah, maybe next time 😅🤞

But beside from that: Great plan as always 👍🚀

[shadzhipopov]

What about recursive queries? In almost every project (if not every) I had to write some recursive CTEs, and it would be really nice if we can move this SQL to code. In SQL server, postgre and oracle, the SQL is almost identical, and I do not expect that every db provider will support them, but I believe this is somewhat missing piece...

Merry Christmas to all

[ajcvickers]

@shadzhipopov Make sure to vote (👍) for #2865.

[janstrube]

I would like to see support for Table Value Parameters (TVP). This can increase performance and simplify business logic significantly when you have to deal with larger client side collections, yet EF has very limited support. The work around using bulk copy inserts into a temp table are sub-optimal.

[ilmax]

Any chance to support global query filters with compiled models in the 8 timeframe?

[Misiu]

Please consider read-only entities (#7586).

[ajcvickers]

@janstrube Please vote (👍) for #19016 and/or #13239. It's unlikely these will make it into 8.

@ilmax Please vote for #24897. This might make 8 based on some of the AOT work that is going on--see #29924.

@Misiu Please vote for #7586. It's unlikely this will make it into 8.