I recently had the honor of appearing on The 6 Figure Developer podcast. I reminisced about the history of Entity Framework and the role I’ve been blessed to play in it. Have a listen!

I put together a timeline to go with the episode:

Year Event
2006 WinFS cancelled

First preview of Entity Framework released
2008 Vote of no confidence

EF 1.0 released as part of .NET Framework 3.5 SP1

LINQ to SQL cancelled
2009 Programming Entity Framework (by Julie Lerman) published
2010 EF 4.0 released (POCO, foreign keys, lazy loading, templates)

Magic Unicorn Edition released

I joined the team

Programming Entity Framework: Code First (by Julie Lerman and Rowan Miller) published
2011 Programming Entity Framework: DbContext (by Julie Lerman and Rowan Miller) published

EF 4.1 released (DbContext, code first)
2012 EF 4.3 released (migrations)

Went open source

EF 5.0 released (enums, spatial, TVFs)

Move from SQL org to Azure (ASP.NET)
2013 EF 6.0 released (async, connection resiliency, custom conventions, sprocs)
2014 EF 6.1 released

Began work on EF7
2016 EF7 renamed to EF Core

EF Core 1.0 released (mixed-eval, shadow state properties, unique constraints, sequences, batching, attach graph APIs)

EF Core 1.1 released (memory-optimized tables)
2017 EF Core 2.0 released (table splitting, owned entities, global query filters, function mapping)

EF 6.2 released
2018 EF Core 2.1 released (lazy loading, value converters, keyless entity types, group by, constructor parameters, seeding)

Entity Framework Core in Action (by Jon P Smith) published

EF Core 2.2 released (spatial, owned collections, query tags)
2019 Moved to DevDiv (.NET) org

EF Core 3.0 released (Azure Cosmos DB, await foreach, nullable reference types, single server-eval query, interceptors)

EF 6.3 released (.NET Core)

EF 6.4 released

EF Core 3.1 released
2020 Entity Framework Community Standup premiered

EF Core 5.0 released (many-to-many, TPT, collations, TVFs, filtered include, property bags, table rebuilds, exclude from migrations, change-tracking proxies)
2021 EF Core 6.0 released (perf improvements, compiled models, migration bundles, temporal tables, pre-convention configuration)
2022 EF Core 7.0 planned (TPC, JSON columns, value objects, bulk updates, templates, sprocs, conventions, trimming support, entity splitting, group by improvements, raw SQL improvements, migrations improvements)

If you’re interested in learning more about the history of EF, here are some very interesting blogs you can dig through: