EF Core with MVC Overview

What is MVC?

MVC stands for Model, View, and Controller. MVC separates the application into three components

• Model: Responsible for maintaining application data and business logic.
• View: User interface of the application, which displays the data.
• Controller: Handles users requests and renders appropriate View with Model data.

The MVC design pattern has been around for a few decades, and it's been used across many different technologies.

What is ASP.NET Core MVC?

The ASP.NET Core MVC framework is a lightweight, open source, highly testable presentation framework optimized for use with ASP.NET Core.

• It provides a patterns-based way to build dynamic websites that enables a clean separation of concerns.
• It gives you full control over markup, supports TDD-friendly development and uses the latest web standards.

Features

• Routing: A powerful URL-mapping component that lets you build applications that have comprehensible and searchable URLs.
• Model binding: Converts client request data into objects that the controller can handle.
• Model validation: Supports validation by decorating your model object with data annotation validation attributes.
• Dependency Injection (DI): Built-in support for dependency injection, controllers can request needed services through their constructors, allowing them to follow the Explicit Dependencies Principle.
• Filters: Encapsulate cross-cutting concerns, like exception handling or authorization.
• Areas: Provide a way to partition a large ASP.NET Core MVC Web app into smaller functional groupings.
• Web APIs: Support for building Web APIs, and you can build services that reach a broad range of clients including browsers and mobile devices.
• Testability: The framework's use of interfaces and dependency injection make it well-suited to unit testing.
• Razor view engine: Razor is a compact, expressive and fluid template markup language for defining views using embedded C# code.
• Strongly typed views: Razor views in MVC can be strongly typed based on your model.
• Tag Helpers: Enable server-side code to participate in creating and rendering HTML elements in Razor files.
• View Components: The SetCompatibilityVersion method allows an app to opt in or opt out of potentially breaking behavior changes introduced in ASP.NET Core MVC 2.1 or later.

What is Entity Framework Core?

Entity Framework (EF) Core is a lightweight, extensible, open source and cross-platform version of the popular Entity Framework data access technology.

• EF Core can serve as an object-relational mapper (O/RM), enabling .NET developers to work with a database using .NET objects.
• It eliminates the need for most of the data-access code developers usually need to write.
• It is intended to be used with .NET Core applications, but, it can also be used with standard .NET 4.5+ framework based applications.