Great/Terrible Ideas

I’m not usually a fan of Microsoft Magic, but the code first features of entity framework are super easy to use and understand.

If you write any object oriented programs that talk to a database, you know that talking to the database can be a lot of tedious and uninteresting code to write, especially if your database is simple.

First, download the entityFramework nuget package with the nuget package manager.

Let’s say you had a class like this:

public class UserPref
{
    public string UserName { get; set; }
    public string Key { get; set; }
    public string Payload { get; set; }
}

Just add a primary key

public class UserPref
{
    [Key]
    public int Id { get; set; }
    public string UserName { get; set; }
    public string Key { get; set; }
    public string Payload { get; set; }
}

And make a class that inherits DbContext and add a property of type DbSet<UserPref> to it to make it a table. The next time the application starts, it will connect to the database with the default connection string in the app.config file and just create a database.

Don’t like making migrations? Type enable-migrations -enableautomaticmigrations in the package manager command prompt. That’s really it. Way to go microsoft magic.