EF Version List

The first two versions of Entity Framework shipped with the .NET Framework and had versions numbers that aligned with the version of the framework that they were included in (3.5 and 4).

After this EF started shipping independently and adopted the http://semver.org standard for semantic versioning.

 

Here is a summary of the Entity Framework releases and the features they added. This table includes all the fully supported releases of Entity Framework and the latest pre-release version.

 

 

Product name	Release date	Supported .NET Versions	VS Version	Details
EF (or EF 3.5)		3.5	2008 SP1	Basic O/RM support using the Database First workflow.
EF 4.0		4.0	2010	New features in this release included: • POCO Support, • Lazy loading, • Testability improvements, • Customizable code generation and the • Model first workflow
EF 4.1		4.0	2010	• Published on NuGet. • Simplified DbContext API and the • Code First Workflow.
EF 4.3		4.0	2010	• New Code First Migrations feature: Allowing a database created by Code First to be incrementally changed as your Code First model evolves.
EF 5		4.0, 4.5	2010, 2012	Ttargeting .NET 4.5 Features: -------------------------------------- • Enum support, • Table-Valued Functions, • Spatial Data Types and • Various Performance Improvements. • Entity Framework Designer in Visual Studio 2012 also introduces    o Support for multiple-diagrams per model,    o Coloring of shapes on the design surface and    o Batch import of stored procedures.
EF 6		4.0, 4.5	2010, 2012, 2013	Tooling To add support for the EF6 runtime and to enable shipping out-of-band between releases of Visual Studio. The tooling itself does not include any new features, but most of the new runtime features can be used with models created in the EF Designer.   Runtime The following features work for models created with Code First or the EF Designer:   • Async Query and Save • Connection Resiliency • Code-Based Configuration. • Dependency Resolution. • Interception/SQL logging. • Testability improvements. • DbContext can now be created with a DbConnection that is already opened. • Improved Transaction Support. • Enums, Spatial and Better Performance on .NET 4.0 -. • Improved performance of Enumerable.Contains in LINQ queries. • Improved warm up time (view generation) • Pluggable Pluralization & Singularization Service. • Custom implementations of Equals or GetHashCode. • DbSet.AddRange/RemoveRange • DbChangeTracker.HasChanges. • SqlCeFunctions.   Code First only: • Custom Code First Conventions. • Code First Mapping to Insert/Update/Delete Stored Procedures • Idempotent migrations scripts. • Configurable Migrations History Table. • Multiple Contexts per Database • DbModelBuilder.HasDefaultSchema • DbModelBuilder.Configurations.AddFromAssembly method • Custom Migrations Operations. • Default transaction isolation level is changed to READ_COMMITTED_SNAPSHOT . • Entity and complex types can now be nestedinside classes.

 

Reference: Link

 

Regards,

Arun Manglick