EF Power Tools Beta 4 Available

The Entity Framework Power Tools provide additional design-time tools in Visual Studio to help you develop applications using Entity Framework. Beta 4 of the Power Tools is now available.

Where do I get it?

The Entity Framework Power Tools are available on the Visual Studio Gallery.

You can also install them directly from Visual Studio by selecting Tools > Extensions and Updates… then selecting Online and searching for Entity Framework Power Tools in the Visual Studio Gallery.

What’s new in Beta 4?

Beta 4 updates the Power Tools to work with Entity Framework 6 and Visual Studio 2013. The following issues have also been fixed in this release.

Future of the Power Tools

We’re making an effort to consolidate and simplify the tooling for Entity Framework. As part of this effort, we intend to incorporate functionality from the Power Tools into the Entity Framework Tools for Visual Studio. The Tooling Consolidation feature specification on our CodePlex site outlines some of this work.

Support

This release is a preview of features that we are considering for a future release and is designed to allow you to provide feedback on the design of these features.

If you have a question, we encourage you to ask it on Stack Overflow using the entity-framework tag.

Compatibility

The Power Tools are compatible with Visual Studio 2010 thru 2013 and Entity Framework 4.2 thru 6.0.

There are two specific limitations, however, that you should be aware of:

  • Generate Views won’t work with prerelease versions of EF6.
    It will, however, work with the RTM version when it’s released.
  • View Entity Data Model won’t work with EF6 on Visual Studio 2010.

What does it add to Visual Studio?

The Power Tools are for Code First, model-first, and database-first development and adds the following commands to an Entity Framework submenu inside of Visual Studio.

  • When right-clicking on a C# project
    • Reverse Engineer Code First
    • Customize Reverse Engineer Templates
  • When right-clicking on a code file containing a DbContext derived class
    • View Entity Data Model
    • View Entity Data Model XML
    • View Entity Data Model DDL SQL
    • Generate Views
  • When right-clicking on an Entity Data Model (*.edmx) file
    • Generate Views

For information on using these commands, see the EF Power Tools walkthrough.