Entity Framework Core (EF Core) is the latest ORM from Microsoft for the .NET Core framework in line with the ASP.NET Core roadmap. Now, ASP.NET Core and EF Core provide a great platform to build cross-platform web applications.
EF Core is a complete rewrite of EF 6 into more focused packages to make it leaner. The EF team plans to support both relational and non-relational databases. At the time of writing this book, EF 1.1 was released and will take a while to develop as a mature ORM. To learn more about EF Core, visit https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/ef/.
In this section, we will create the PacktContactsCore web API project to integrate with the database using EF Core. We will use the MS SQL Server 2014 Express Edition as the database server; however, at present, you can also work with SQLite, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.
