Entity Framework is a popular database connection choice for .NET developers. It's fairly simple to use but, what if I told you that we could create a connection framework on top of ASP.NET that would allow us to get total control of the SQL that we write? The cherry on top is that it will take about as much code as it takes to configure Entity Framework.
In this article, I'll show you how to connect an ASP.NET minimal API to a local SQLite database Entity Framework. We will still map tables into classes allowing us to interact with our data in C#. I'll include every line of code you need, so let's get started.
The data
First, we have to do is set up a database. I decided to use SQLite since I've never had an excuse to before. Make sure that you have SQLite installed and that you've connected to a database. (You could also connect to a MySQL, SQL Server or Postgres database using the following method too, but this article will focus on SQLite.)
With our database, we'll track student information and grades. First, connect to SQLite and create a database, we'll call it Students.db, then create a students table and a grades table.
