Announcing Entity Framework Core 3.1 and Entity Framework 6.4

Arthur

December 3rd, 2019

Announcing Entity Framework Core 3.1 and Entity Framework 6.4

We are excited to announce the general availability of EF Core 3.1 and EF 6.4 on nuget.org.

The final versions of .NET Core 3.1 and ASP.NET Core 3.1 are also available now.

How to get EF Core 3.1

EF Core 3.1 is distributed exclusively as a set of NuGet packages. For example, to add the SQL Server provider to your project, you can use the following command using the dotnet tool:

dotnet add package Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.SqlServer --version 3.1.0

When upgrading applications that target older versions of ASP.NET Core to 3.1, you may also have to add the EF Core packages as an explicit dependency.

Starting in 3.0 and continuing for 3.1, the dotnet ef command-line tool is no longer included in the .NET Core SDK. Before you can execute EF Core migration or scaffolding commands, you’ll have to install this package as either a global or local tool. To install the final version of our 3.1.0 tool as a global tool, use the following command:

dotnet tool install --global dotnet-ef --version 3.1.0

It’s possible to use this new version of dotnet ef with projects that use older versions of the EF Core runtime. However, older versions of the tool will not work with EF Core 3.1.

What’s new in EF Core 3.1

The primary goal of EF Core 3.1 is to polish the features and scenarios we delivered in EF Core 3.0. EF Core 3.1 will be a long term support (LTS) release, supported for at least 3 years. To this end we have fixed over 150 issues for the 3.1 release, but there are no major new features to announce.

EF Core 3.1 reintroduces support for .NET Standard 2.0, rather than requiring .NET Standard 2.1 as was the case for EF Core 3.0. This means EF Core 3.1 will run on .NET Framework versions that support the standard.

What’s new in EF 6.4

Similar to EF Core, the primary goal of EF 6.4 is to polish the features and scenarios we delivered in EF 6.3. To this end we have fixed important issues found in EF 6.3 to create a more stable release.

What’s next

Planning for the EF Core “5.0” release (i.e. the one after 3.1) has started and we are making good progress. We will have something to share on GitHub soon.

Thank you

A big thank you to the following community contributors to EF Core and EF6 as part of this release.

@breyed @chrfin @crowet @EricStG @guftall @gurmeetsinghdke @ite-klass @jfoshee @jtheisen @mistachkin @morrisjdev @OOberoi @pacoweb @pmiddleton @Psypher9 @ptjhuang @riccikl @ronnelsantiago @skalpin @StefH @vanillajonathan @Youssef1313

Documentation and feedback

The starting point for all Entity Framework documentation is https://docs.microsoft.com/ef/.

Please file issues found and any other feedback on GitHub for EF Core or EF6.