The Entity Framework data model

Entity Framework, in the words of Microsoft, is as follows:

Entity Framework (EF) is an object-relational mapping technology that enables .NET developers to work with relational data using domain-specific objects. It eliminates the need for most of the data-access code that developers usually need to write. Entity Framework is the Microsoft's recommended ORM modeling technology for new .NET applications.

Note

You can find a nice, although basic, introductory video about Entity Framework at https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/ef.aspx.

As mentioned earlier, the latest version is .NET Core 1.1, and it's still in the adoption phase by the community, so we're using version 6.0 here, which is totally stable and widely tested. In this version, you have three initial choices: starting with an existing database, starting with an empty model, or starting with already existing code.

In the first case, called Database First, a connection is established to the DBMS to read...