Microsoft has announced the availability of Entity Framework 6 Alpha 2 with an ability to improve warm up time for larger models and also includes DbModelBuilder.Configurations.AddFromAssembly method, which enables you to easily add all configuration classes defined in an assembly. However, you should make use of configuration classes with the Code First Fluent API to take advantage of this method.
The latest release includes support for custom code first conventions and provides an ability to create DBContext with a DBConnection class. It also enhances the performance of Enumerable.Contains method in LINQ queries.
Microsoft has changed the default transaction isolation level to READ_COMMITTED_SNAPSHOT for databases created using code first thereby allowing more scalability and fewer deadlocks.
Entity Framework Alpha 2 also includes the following features which was originally introduced in Alpha 1 release
- Async Query and Save
- Multi-Tenant Migrations
- Configurable Migrations History Table
- Code-Based Configuration
- Dependency Resolution
- Updated Provider Model
The upcoming releases of Entity Framework 6 will provide support for stored procedures and functions in code first and connection resiliency which enables restart of database operations if the server connection is lost.