Changes to EF Core With the RTM of VS2017 and Tools

When Visual Studio 2017 released today a few other things happened that are relevant to Entity Framework Core.

EF Core Migrations Tools Release

First – something we were prepared for – the .NET Core SDK was also released. It’s last stable version was 1.0.0-preview2-1-003137. It’s now simply 1.0.0. Along with this, it’s dependent tooling, including EF Core Tools for PowerShell and dotnet were also released. As the .NET Core support evolved from project.json to msbuild, the EF Core tools split . We have been using 1.0.0-preview4 (for .NET and project.json) and 1.0.0-msbuild3 for msbuild/csproj support.

Now the tool packages are 1.1.0 (Tools) and 1.0.0 (Tools.DotNet)

For PowerShell support: Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Tools 1.1.0
For dotnet CLI support: Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Tools.DotNet 1.0.0

In Visual Studio 2015 (for full .NET projects) and Visual Studio 2017 (shown here, for full .NET or .NET Core projects), the Package Manager will show the RTM versions:

Notice that I do not have “Include prerelease” checked.

If using PMC to install, it’s just

install-package Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Tools

That’s for the PowerShell tools, otherwise, add .DotNet to the name.

But notice that you no longer need to add the –pre.

When using the CLI version of the tools, the command

dotnet ef –version

results in

Entity Framework Core .NET Command Line Tools 1.0.0-rtm-10308

Changes to Migrations Commands

As the tools evolved through the previews, some details changed for example, the scaffolding command got smarter.

But one change that is notable is with respect to EF Core in class libraries. You still need to point to an executable project (exe or test) to run most of the commands, but now you can at least just use “dotnet ef” to get the help file without having to set the –startup-project parameter. There are a few other commands that will run without knowledge of the startup project. You can read more about this in this GitHub thread. Check some of the later comments by Brice Lambson as he worked on evolving the commands.

EF Core 1.1.1 – Patch

This was a more subtle part of the release. Even though the 1.1.1 milestone on GitHub had 30 bug fixes that are all closed , there hadn’t been any mention that this was going to get pushed out and the milestone had no target date on it. Though I had my suspicions! Here’s a screenshot I happened to take on March 5.

And yes, the newest version of the EF Core packages is now 1.1.1. These are bug fixes …as the increment suggests.  Most of them are edge cases, but regardless, you should definitely update your EF Core packages to ensure you have these latest fixes. If you’re creating new projects, 1.1.1 is what you’ll see available from NuGet.