Reverse Engineering Quick Start

This guide walks you through the basic steps of generating a DbContext and entity classes for an Azure SQL or SQL Server database. For detailed instructions see the wiki

A 10 minute YouTube based version of this guide is also available.

• Install EF Core Power Tools via the Extensions/Manage Extensions menu inside Visual Studio.

• Right click a project in Solution Explorer, select EF Core Power Tools/Reverse Engineer or press Ctrl+Shift+A, select the Data folder, and select the EF Core Database First Wizard

• Connect to your existing database via the Add button (or pick an existing connection from the drop down list)

• Choose database objects, you can use the top checkbox to select all objects

• Choose options, or just accept the defaults

• Click OK, and C# DbContext and entity classes will be generated in the current project.

You can now start coding with EF Core and LINQ:

using var db = new ChinookContext();

var hairAlbum = db.Albums.Where(a => a.Title == "Hair").FirstOrDefault();

If you do not use Visual Studio, I also have a command line version of this tool