EF Core platforms experience

[ajcvickers]

This is a grouping of related issues. Feel free to vote (👍) for this issue to indicate that this is an area that you think we should spend time on, but consider also voting for individual issues for things you consider especially important.

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This an "epic" issue for the theme of improving the EF Core experience in various app models. Specific pieces of work will be tracked by linked issues.

Done in 7.0

• Improve experience for data binding and graphical interfaces #26799

Backlog

• Improve trimming support for EF Core apps to reduce application size #21894
• Modernize EF Core tooling #26798
• Investigate time-to-first-query and per-query in Blazor WASM with Sqlite #26949
• Tools: Support Xamarin/MAUI Projects (currently requires separate .NET Standard class library) #7152
• Show a warning when the tools are used with a platform-specific app #32835
• Don't use reflection at runtime #24903
• Investigate perf with EF Core on MAUI #12087

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We have good guidance for using EF Core in traditional MVC-like web applications. Guidance for other platforms and application models is either missing or out-of-date. For EF Core 5.0 we plan to investigate, improve, and document the experience of using EF Core with:

• Blazor
• Xamarin, including using the AOT/linker story
• WinForms/WPF/WinUI and possibly other U.I. frameworks

As with is likely to be many small improvements in EF Core, together with guidance and longer-term collaborations with other teams to improve end-to-end experiences that go beyond just EF.

Specific areas we plan to look at are:

• Deployment, including the experience for using EF tooling such as for Migrations
• Application models, including Xamarin and Blazor, and probably others
• SQLite experiences, including the spatial experience and table rebuilds
• AOT and linking experiences
• Diagnostics integration, including perf counters

[bricelam]

Some related issues:

#329
#10963
#12087
#13099
#17223
#18908
#19535

[Felix-Dev]

WinForms/WPF/WinUI and possibly other U.I. frameworks

Does this include UWP?

[ajcvickers]

@Felix-Dev We're still working out the details here. See #19978 (comment) for a longer discussion.