Microsoft has revealed its plans for the Entity Framework Core 6.0.
The company plans on working on the most requested features, based on user feedback through the project’s GitHub page. Current features planned include SQL Server temporal tables, JSON columns, and the ability to have arbitrary ordering of columns when creating a table with Migrations.
There are also a number of performance enhancements planned, including improving the infrastructure for performance tests, compiled models that will improve startup performance, matching Dapper performance on the TechEmpower Fortunes benchmark, and making EF Core work better with linkers and AOT.
Microsoft also plans to offer better support for managing migrations and deploying databases. It will focus on two major areas of improvement: migrations bundles and managing migrations.
In addition, it will work on improving existing features, such as EF6 query parity, value objects, Cosmos database provider, and more.
Other areas Microsoft will be exploring during the EF Core 6 timeframe include SqlServer.Core and GraphQL. The company noted that it will only be experimentally looking at these areas and that there are no concrete deliverables planned for the release.
The Entity Framework Core 6.0 is scheduled for release in November 2021. It will come out at the same time as .NET 6 and will align with the release as an LTS release.
