A Comparative Look at Entity Framework Code First

The motivation behind this project is to examine what “Entity Framework Code First” is bringing to the world of object relational mappers and data access and how it compares to the more traditional methods of the past. The problem is whether Entity Framework’s high level of abstraction from the database schema is useful to the developers in reducing code development or if traditional approaches with their robust, custom data layers provide developers with an overall better performance. To analyze Entity Framework, a real-world business web application was developed implementing an Entity Framework Code First approach to data access. Using this implementation of a business application, comparisons were drawn between Entity Framework and more traditional data access techniques. The results of the research conclude that while it does have some criticisms, Entity Framework is an improvement upon traditional approaches. It greatly reduces the time spent writing code for the application’s data access layer, makes managing database relationships and data objects easier, provides a level of abstraction to isolate the database from the developer’s application, and translates queries at runtime allowing minimal code impact with regards to database storage changes