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EF Core–.NET 8 update

The .NET 8 release of Entity Framework Core offers a large list of new features. The goal of this post is not to walk you through all these features, therefore you can have a look at the What's new page on Microsoft Learn, instead I want to talk about a specific feature as a follow-up on the previous posts about EF Core I did this week.

In those posts I talked about the FromSql method to use your handwritten SQL statements to fetch EF Core entities. What I didn’t mention is that this only worked for entities that were registered as an entity to the DbContext.

Starting with the EF Core 8 release, this condition has been removed, allowing us to create any SQL statements you want and map them to C# objects.

This means that EF Core can now become an alternative to micro-ORM’s like Dapper. Of course there is maybe still a performance difference(I’ll do a benchmark and share the results) but feature wise this is a great addition.

To use this feature, we need to call the SqlQuery<T> method:

The cool thing is that you can combine this with Linq statements. EF Core will generate a SQL query that combines your handwritten statement with generated SQL:

More information

What's New in EF Core 8 | Microsoft Learn

SQL Queries - EF Core | Microsoft Learn

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