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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-13T07:17:06+00:00

I am developing a (free, open-source) Entity Framework tool, it is basicaly an ADO.NET

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I am developing a (free, open-source) Entity Framework tool, it is basicaly an ADO.NET provider, but it uses some higher abstractions too (e.g. ObjectContext, EntityConnection). I want it to support almost all the legacy version of EF (EF4=<). Until EF5 came out it was quite easy, because I had been able to develop it by targeting only .NET40.

EF5 made the things more complicated, because some of the new features requires the .NET45 framework. On the other hand, EF5 supports .NET40 too. An on the top of that, EF is now developed independently from the .NET framework.

For now, It is obvious that targeting both .NET40 and .NET45 is inevitable. But currently I have no idea what is the best way to setup a multi-target environment that can comply with the independently developed EF. I also haven’t found any good document about this problem.

Should I use multiple solution files? Multiple project files? Multiple solution configurations? Reference all version of EF somehow? Create an universal build script? If yes, how? How to run my unit test against different configurations? How to indicate that a test can/should fail in a specific configuration? What about the changed namespaces (e.g. ObjectContext)? Should I use #if directive to solve this conflict? What if a new EF release requires to implement a feature that will break the compatibilty with previous versions? I am really uncertain at this point.

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  1. Editorial Team

    Take a look at the EF6 code base at http://entityframework.codeplex.com/. We build EF6 for .NET 4 and .NET 4.5 in essentially the way you are suggesting–using multiple build configurations.

    Some other points to consider:

    • If you don’t make use of any .NET 4.5 APIs or behaviors, then you may be able to just target the .NET 4 version. If you are using anything from EntityFramework.dll, then this may require a binding redirect to use the 5.0 version, but in a lot of cases if you ship as a NuGet package then NuGet will handle this for you.
    • If you plan to support EF6, then keep in mind that the core types have been moved out of the .NET Framework. This means, for example, that the EF5 ObjectContext is a different type from the EF6 ObjectContext. You will likely have to compile your provider code twice to create EF6 and EF5 versions in order to handle this. More information can be found here: http://entityframework.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Rebuilding%20EF%20providers%20for%20EF6
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