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:

	var results = await db
	.Database
	.SqlQuery<Product>($"SELECT * FROM dbo.Products")
	.ToList();
	record Product(int ProductID, string ProductName);

view raw GetProducts.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

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:

	SELECT "n"."ProductID", "n"."ProductName", "n"."CategoryID"
	FROM (
	SELECT * FROM dbo.Products
	) AS "n"
	WHERE "n"."CategoryID" = 1

view raw GetProducts.sql hosted with ❤ by GitHub

	var categoryID=1;
	var results = await db
	.Database
	.SqlQuery<Product>($"SELECT * FROM dbo.Products")
	.Where(p=> p.CategoryID==1)
	.ToList();
	record Product(int ProductID, string ProductName, string CategoryID);

view raw GetProductsFiltered.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

More information

What's New in EF Core 8 | Microsoft Learn

SQL Queries - EF Core | Microsoft Learn