Is DbContext the same as DataContext?
DbContext
is a new class that was added in the recent separate download by EF team. It is currently not part of the core EF 4.0. However DbContext
moving forward would be the preferred way to interact with EF.
So how is it different from ObjectContext
? Well semantically they are exactly same but they reduced lot of extra noise that ObjectContext
had. Like exposing a set required more work, for instance:
public ObjectSet<Customer> Customers
{
get { return db.CreateObjectSet<Customer>(); }
}
With DbContext
you can do:
public DbSet<Customer> Customers { get; set; }
Basically on the ObjectContext
, when you do dot (.
), everything is just right there which makes the list pretty huge. What the EF team actually wanted to expose on DbContext
are entities which are only specific to your domain and rest of ability of the framework is tucked in under different properties. It just makes the programming experience easier.
This means if you are using ObjectContext
right now, with a little bit of code, you can easily move to DbContext
.
DbContext
- one of EntityFramework's classes.
- represents a Session between your program & a Database.
- allows your program to send & retrieve data to/from a Database.
DataContext
- a class you create in your program that inherits from
DbContext
. - use
DataContext
to retrieve or update data locally in your program. - then push changes (using methods from the inherited
DbContext
) to the actual Database to update it.
It's a bit too late, but for the googlers. DbContext
is used for EF
(EntityFramework) and DataContext
is used for L2S
(LINQ To SQL).