A key aspect of adopting any new pattern is understanding how it interacts with the surrounding application infrastructure. When using Discriminated Unions, questions arise: How can a Result union be serialized to JSON? How can an OrderState union be persisted using Entity Framework Core? This article explores practical integration strategies with common .NET frameworks.
Learn how to seamlessly integrate Smart Enums with essential .NET frameworks and libraries. This article covers practical solutions for JSON serialization, ASP.NET Core model binding for both Minimal APIs and MVC controllers, and Entity Framework Core persistence using value converters. Discover how Thinktecture.Runtime.Extensions provides dedicated packages to eliminate integration friction and maintain type safety across your application stack.
Value Objects in .NET provide a structured way to improve consistency and maintainability in domain modeling. This article examines their integration with popular frameworks and libraries, highlighting best practices for seamless implementation. From working with Entity Framework to leveraging their advantages in ASP.NET, we explore how Value Objects can be effectively incorporated into various architectures. By understanding their role in framework integration, developers can optimize data handling and enhance code clarity without unnecessary complexity.
.NET 8 brings Native AOT to ASP.NET Core, but many frameworks and libraries rely on unbound reflection internally and thus cannot support this scenario yet. This is true for ORMs, too: EF Core and Dapper will only bring full support for Native AOT in later releases. In this post, we will implement a database access layer with Sessions using the Humble Object pattern to get a similar developer experience. We will use Npgsql as a plain ADO.NET provider targeting PostgreSQL.
In Entity Framework Core 3 (EF 3) the SQL statement generation (re)introduced the Cartesian Explosion problem. A lot has happened since then, so it is time to revisit the issue with Entity Framework Core 7 (EF 7).
The N+1 queries problem has been our constant companion since day one of Entity Framework (Core). Entity Framework Core 2 (EF 2) introduced a new feature that caused the “N+1 queries problem” more often and was more difficult to detect, so it was removed in the following version. After a little back and forth, let’s see how Entity Framework Core 7 (EF 7) handles this issue and why it will likely remain in the future.
The requirement to store additional fields, unknown at development time, in a relational database is not new. Nonetheless, none of the projects I know of are willing to change the database structure at runtime. What if there is a project which needs dynamically created fields and doesn’t want or cannot use entity–attribute–value model or switch to No-SQL databases?
The default implementation of Entity Framework Core prefers to play it safe (for good reasons) when working with byte arrays. This ‘safety’ is – in some use cases – unnecessary and costs us a lot of memory and CPU. In this article, we will see that doing less is sufficient for the given property thanks to one of the most overlooked features of Entity Framework.
