Announcing Entity Framework Core (EF Core) 5 RC2 from .NET Blog

Today, the Entity Framework Core team announces the second release candidate (RC2) of EF Core 5.0. This is
a feature complete release candidate of EF Core 5.0 and ships with a "go live" license. You are supported
using it in production. This is a great opportunity to start using EF Core 5.0 early while there is still time to
fix remaining issues. We're looking for reports of any remaining critical bugs that should be fixed before the
final release.

Prerequisites

EF Core 5.0 will not run on .NET Standard 2.0 platforms, including .NET Framework.

• The release candidates of EF Core 5.0 require .NET Standard 2.1.
• This means that EF Core 5.0 will run on .NET Core 3.1 and does not require .NET 5.
• To summarize: EF Core 5.0 runs on platforms
  that support .NET Standard 2.1.

How to get EF Core 5.0 Release Candidate 2

EF Core 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 5.0.0-rc.2.20475.6

This following table links to the RC2 versions of the EF Core packages and describes what they are used for.

Installing the EF Core Command Line Interface (CLI)

As with EF Core 3.0 and 3.1, the EF Core CLI 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 RC2 tool globally the first time, use:

dotnet tool install --global dotnet-ef --version 5.0.0-rc.2.20475.6

If you already have the tool installed, update it with:

dotnet tool update --global dotnet-ef --version 5.0.0-rc.2.20475.6

It’s possible to use this new version of the EF Core CLI with projects that use older versions of the EF Core
runtime.

What's New in EF Core 5 RC2

We maintain documentation covering new
features introduced into each release. This release included several bug fixes.

Daily builds

EF Core previews and release candidates are aligned with the .NET 5 release cycle. These releases tend to lag behind
the latest work on EF Core. Consider using the daily builds instead to get the
most up-to-date EF Core features and bug fixes.

As with the previews, the daily builds do not require .NET 5; they can be used with GA/RTM release of .NET Core 3.1.
Daily builds are considered stable.

Contribute to .NET 5

The .NET documentation team is reorganizing .NET content to
better match the workloads you build with .NET. This includes a new .NET Data landing page that will link out to data-related
topics ranging from EF Core to APIs, Big Data, and Machine learning. The planning and execution will be done
completely in the open on GitHub. This is your opportunity to help shape the hierarchy and content to best fit your
needs as a .NET developer. We look forward to your contributions!

The EF Core Community Standup

The EF Core team is now live streaming every other Wednesday at 10am Pacific Time, 1pm Eastern Time, or 17:00 UTC.
Join the stream to ask questions about the EF Core topic of your choice, including the latest release candidate.
Visit the .NET Community Standup page to
preview upcoming shows and view recordings from past shows.

Documentation and Feedback

The starting point for all EF Core documentation is docs.microsoft.com/ef/.

Please file issues found and any other feedback on the dotnet/efcore
GitHub repo.

Helpful Short Links

The following short links are provided for easy reference and access.

Main documentation:
https://aka.ms/efdocs

Issues and feature requests for EF Core:
https://aka.ms/efcorefeedback

Entity Framework Roadmap:
https://aka.ms/efroadmap

What's new in EF Core 5.x?
https://aka.ms/efcore5

Thank you from the team

A big thank you from the EF team to everyone who has used EF over the years!

Arthur Vickers	Andriy Svyryd	Brice Lambson	Jeremy Likness
Maurycy Markowski	Shay Rojansky	Smit Patel

Thank you to our contributors!

A huge "thanks" to all the community members who have already contributed code or documentation to
the EF Core 5 release!

The post Announcing Entity Framework Core (EF Core) 5 RC2 appeared first on .NET Blog.