We as developers can make a lot of code work. But, does this mean were doing it the right way? Sometimes it will be, other times theres a better way. And when theres a better way were often not even aware of it. There are many reasons for this. Deadlines, having a bad day, new features, copy-pasting a solution (or generated by AI these days), lack of knowledge, and other factors can lead to not ideal solutions. This blog post is about me not knowing all the functionality that Entity Framework provides, which I wish I knew earlier. I discovered these while bumping across someones article or talk, a friend who pointed me to it, or by reading the documentation. Even by writing this blog post, I discovered some additional functions. Instead of using workarounds, that often introduce some gotchas, I hope this blog post can also help you to do things in the recommended/official way. To follow along with the examples, we need a starting point to work with. For this blog post, Im using the following simple model. We have a Customer entity, which has a collection of Address entities. AutoInclude is a feature that simplifies the eager loading of related entities. It automates this process by automatically including the related entities when retrieving the data.
