Tooling
SkillProductivityGives your agent reference details for using dotnet-ef CLI commands and EF Core tooling in .NET projects.
Available today. Use it from your connected AI after setup.
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Then ask your AI: use the Tooling skill
About this capability
Implementation details for the EF Core dotnet-ef CLI and tooling. Use when changing dotnet-ef commands, the ef wrapper, EFCore.Tools (PMC), or EFCore.Tasks MSBuild integration.
What this skill tells your AI
The instructions your AI receives, as published by dotnet/efcore in .agents/skills/tooling/SKILL.md and read by ahel’s review.
The dotnet ef CLI and Visual Studio Package Manager Console commands for migrations, scaffolding, and compiled models.
dotnet-ef CLI (src/dotnet-ef/)
RootCommand parses global options. Subcommands implemented in src/ef/Commands/. Each invokes MSBuild to build, then shells out via dotnet exec ef.dll, which hosts OperationExecutor.
PMC (src/EFCore.Tools/)
PowerShell module: Add-Migration, Update-Database, Scaffold-DbContext, Optimize-DbContext, etc.
MSBuild Tasks (src/EFCore.Tasks/)
NuGet package Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Tasks provides build/publish-time compiled model and precompiled query generation. Targets in buildTransitive/Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Tasks.targets.
Testing
- CLI tests:
test/dotnet-ef.Tests/,test/ef.Tests/ - EFCore.Tasks has no dedicated test project — for task/target changes, create a test project and manually run
dotnet build/dotnet publishwithEFOptimizeContext=trueto verify
Validation
- For tool changes, create a test project and manually run affected commands to verify behavior
dotnet ef migrations scriptoutput matches expected DDL
Signals
- GitHub stars
- 15k
- Forks
- 3k
- Last commit
- Sep 2026
Advanced
- Catalog kind
- skill
- Gateway key
tooling- Source
- github.com/dotnet/efcore