Moving from Windows Forms with EDMX to WPF

Hi Patrick,

thanks for reply.

You’ve described my situation perfectly — I’m currently using EF6 with EDMX, partial classes, and a DbContext, exactly as you mentioned.

I’m honestly quite undecided about what to do next. Everything is already set up and working nicely with EF6, so it’s very convenient for me. But moving to .NET 6/7/8 would mean basically redoing everything from scratch, and I haven’t found a clear step-by-step guide or tutorial that shows how to properly make that transition, in WPF.

Do you have any advice or recommended resources for someone in my position?

Thank you

If you are coming from a Windows Forms background using EDMX, then the closest modern equivalent depends mainly on whether you are staying on .NET Framework or moving to modern .NET (6, 7 or 8) for your WPF application. If you are staying on the older .NET Framework, you can actually keep using EF6 with EDMX exactly the same way as before. The “Update Model from Database” wizard still exists, it still works inside WPF, and the workflow remains identical to what you had in WinForms. That is perfectly valid if you explicitly want to maintain that familiar designer-driven experience.

if you are moving to modern WPF targeting .NET 6/7/8, then the industry-standard approach is Entity Framework Core using database-first scaffolding instead of EDMX. EF Core deliberately does not include a visual designer, but it provides a command (or Visual Studio extension via EF Core Power Tools) that can reverse-engineer your SQL Server database and generate POCO entity classes and a DbContext. If your database changes, you simply re-run the scaffold and it updates the generated entity classes to match your database again. In practice, this replaces “Update Model from Database” , just in a more code way rather than a drag and drop designer.

To replicate the same convenience you had before, EF Core Power Tools is a the recommended Visual Studio extension, as it gives you a UI that behaves much closer to the EDMX wizard. You select your database, choose the tables you want, and it scaffolds your entities with optional attributes, pluralisation rules and so on. You can safely re-run it whenever your schema changes. You simply keep your custom logic in separate partial classes so that re-scaffolding never overwrites your own code.

Either way, WPF works fine with Entity Framework ,the main difference is just whether you remain on EF6 with EDMX or adopt EF Core. If long-term maintainability, performance and support matter, EF Core is strongly recommended. It is the current and future direction of Microsoft’s data stack. If you choose EF Core, the “database drives the code, and I update entities when the database changes” workflow still exists, it is just done via dotnet ef dbcontext scaffold or the EF Core Power Tools GUI instead of EDMX.