Entity Framework V6 (EF6) Beta 1 from Microsoft Includes Latest & Greatest Open Source Contributions

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Microsoft Corp. has just announced the Beta 1 release of Entity Framework 6 (EF6).  EF6 combines the latest and greatest open source community contributions with key features and tooling that you were asking for.  Here’s the official announcement with a full list of new features.  

As you might recall, last summer Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. (MS Open Tech) announced that the Entity Framework (EF) was now open source.  Since then several iterations have been released, and many new features and capabilities have been added from the development team at the Microsoft Open Tech Hub as well as some great contributions from the software developer community.  Here are some highlights from the 21 community pull requests that we accepted:

· Custom Migrations Operations were enabled by a contribution from iceclow and this blog post provides an example of using this new feature.

· Pluggable Pluralization & Singularization Service was contributed by UnaiZorrilla.

· Significantly improved warm up time (view generation) – especially for large models – via a contribution from AlirezaHaghshenas.

This Get It page has all the information on installing the prerelease and current runtime packages in Visual Studio 2012.

Don’t know your Model First from your Code First or Database First?  Here’s a great intro to EF and EF concepts.

The team is now putting the finishing touches on the EF6 release.  Early adopters can test drive the latest Beta features in the signed nightly build. And don’t forget to have a look at the latest Feature Specifications and Design Meeting Notes.  And follow the MS Open Tech  development team on Twitter and like them on Facebook to keep in the loop on the latest developments from the team and the community. 

Let the MS Open Tech hub team know your experiences with EF6 by start up a discussion on CodePlex for feedback.   You can also post questions and find answers on StackOverflow by using the entity-framework tag.