EF Core Helper for Visual Studio

The first-class Entity Framework Core GUI and management experience — built natively for Visual Studio.

💡 Why EF Core Helper?

Entity Framework Core is essential for modern .NET applications, yet managing migrations has traditionally required memorizing obscure command line flags or using the ancient Package Manager Console:

• Manually typing repetitive --project and --startup-project paths every time.
• Leaving the visual design environment to execute commands in a separate terminal.
• Guessing CLI arguments and options without immediate validation or preview.

EF Core Helper modernizes your EF Core developer experience. It provides a comprehensive, visual management suite built directly into Visual Studio, specifically tailored for modern .NET Core / .NET 6+ / 8+ / 9+ / 10+ projects:

• Visual, structured dialogs with Interactive Live Command Previews.
• One-click migration generation, database updates, rollbacks, and idempotent scripts.
• Automatic solution scanning for DbContexts, projects, and connection strings.
• Real-time execution logs with color-coded status, copy output, and cancellation controls.

⚡ Feature Highlights

✨ Key Features

1. 🗂️ Dedicated Entity Framework Core Tool Window

• Context Selectors: Pick your Target Project, Startup Project, and DbContext from clean dropdowns that automatically scan your solution.
• Project Filter: Exclusively focuses on modern .NET Core / .NET SDK projects (filtering out legacy .NET Framework noise).
• Migration History Explorer: Browse all migrations in your project with timestamp, ID, and right-click actions ("Update database to here", "Script from here").
• Tooling Status Banner: Automatically detects if dotnet and dotnet-ef are installed, with a 1-click Install dotnet-ef button if missing.

2. 🔍 Interactive Live Command Preview

Every dialog includes a real-time command preview box that updates interactively as you type or toggle options:

dotnet ef migrations add InitialCreate --project MyApp.Data --startup-project MyApp.Web --context AppDbContext

Inspect the exact arguments before running, or click Copy to run it in your own terminal.

3. ➕ Add Migration Dialog

• Name validation ensuring valid C# identifiers.
• Target project and startup project selection.
• Output directory (Migrations default or custom path) and custom namespace override.
• Build bypass (--no-build) and verbose diagnostics (--verbose).

4. ⚡ Update Database Dialog

• Pick from <Latest> (Apply all pending), 0 (Revert all migrations), or any specific migration in your history.
• Connection String Override: Auto-populated from your project's appsettings.json, appsettings.Development.json, or enter custom connection strings.

5. 🏗️ DbContext Scaffolding Wizard (Database First)

• Quick presets for popular database providers:
  • SQL Server (Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.SqlServer)
  • PostgreSQL (Npgsql.EntityFrameworkCore.PostgreSQL)
  • MySQL / MariaDB (Pomelo.EntityFrameworkCore.MySql)
  • SQLite (Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Sqlite)
  • Oracle (Oracle.EntityFrameworkCore)
  • Azure Cosmos DB (Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Cosmos)
• Separate directories for generated entity models and DbContext.
• Filter by specific tables and schemas.
• Options for Data Annotations (--data-annotations), Database Names (--use-database-names), Force overwrite (--force), and Singularization (--no-pluralize).

6. 📜 Idempotent SQL Scripts & Executable Bundles

• Script Generation: Generate migration scripts from a starting migration to a target migration, with --idempotent and --no-transactions toggles.
• Migration Bundles: Compile standalone deployment executables (dotnet ef migrations bundle) targeting any runtime (win-x64, linux-x64, osx-arm64).

7. 💻 Real-Time Execution Console

• Watch dotnet ef output stream in real time with syntax coloring.
• Visual execution state: Ready (gray), Running (yellow spinner), Success (green checkmark), Failed (red).
• Stop / Cancel button to kill the active process tree safely if an operation hangs.
• Simultaneous output to the Visual Studio Output Window ("Entity Framework Core" pane).

🚀 Installation & Getting Started

Method 1: Install via Visual Studio Marketplace (Coming Soon)

1. Open Visual Studio 2022.
2. Go to Extensions > Manage Extensions.
3. Search for EF Core Helper and click Download.
4. Restart Visual Studio.

Method 2: Manual VSIX Installation

1. Download EFCoreHelper.vsix from the Releases page.
2. Close all Visual Studio instances.
3. Double-click EFCoreHelper.vsix to install.

Quick Start

1. Open any solution containing a .NET Core EF Core project.
2. Open the tool window:
   • Go to Tools > Entity Framework Core > Entity Framework Core Tool Window
   • Or press keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Alt+E, M
   • Or right-click any project in Solution Explorer > EF Core > Open EF Core Tool Window
3. Select your project and DbContext, and start managing your migrations effortlessly!

🛠️ Building From Source

Prerequisites

• Visual Studio 2022 (17.0+) with .NET desktop development and Visual Studio extension development workloads.
• .NET SDK (8.0+ or 10.0+).
• dotnet-ef global CLI tool (dotnet tool install --global dotnet-ef).

Build Command

Clone the repository and run the automated build script:

git clone https://github.com/pishangujeniya/efcore-helper.git
cd efcore-helper
.\build.ps1

The compiled and packaged extension will be placed in:

artifacts/EFCoreHelper.vsix

Running Automated Tests

dotnet test

🚀 Deployment & Marketplace Publishing

Releases are automatically prepared via GitHub Actions (release.yml), and uploaded to the Visual Studio Marketplace. For step-by-step instructions on triggering releases, downloading assets, and uploading packages, see the Publishing Guide.

🤝 Contributing

We welcome contributions from the open-source community! Whether you want to report a bug, suggest a new feature, or submit a pull request, we'd love to have you onboard.

• Check out our Contributing Guide for details on development setup, debugging with the Experimental Instance (/rootsuffix Exp), and coding standards.
• Read our Code of Conduct.
• Security disclosures should follow our Security Policy.

📄 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. Copyright © 2026 Pishang Ujeniya.