Since the release of EF6 a couple of months ago our team has started working on the EF6.1 release. This is our next release that will include new features.
What’s in Alpha 1
It’s still early days in the 6.1 release, so there aren’t many new features to try out just yet. Most of our work so far has been fixing bugs, improving performance, and laying groundwork for new features.
Runtime
The following items are included in Alpha 1 runtime
- Handling of transaction commit failures provides the ability to detect and recover automatically when transient connection failures affect the acknowledgement of transaction commits. You can read more about this feature in the specification on our CodePlex site.
- EntityFramework.SqlServerCompact.Legacy is a new NuGet package (contributed by ErikEJ) that allows you to use Entity Framework 6 to target SQL Compact 3.5.
- Bug fixes, minor features, and performance improvements included in the Alpha 1 release can be viewed on our CodePlex site.
Tooling
Our 6.1 tooling code base isn’t ready for preview yet. We’ll be including the tooling in future previews of EF6.1.
Where do I get Alpha 1?
The runtime is available on NuGet. If you are using Code First then there is no need to install the tooling. Follow the instructions on our Get It page for installing the latest pre-release version of Entity Framework runtime.
The tooling isn’t ready for preview yet, but you can use the EF6.1 Alpha 1 runtime with the existing EF6 Tooling for Visual Studio 2012 and 2013.
Support
This is a preview of features that will be available in the final release of EF6.1 and is designed to allow you to try out the new features and report any issues you encounter. Microsoft does not guarantee any level of support on this release.
If you need assistance using the new features, please post questions on Stack Overflow using the entity-framework tag.
What’s next?
We still have plenty of bugs to fix and some new features to add before we release EF6.1. There will be more previews over the coming months including previews of the EF6.1 Tooling.