7.4. Preparing a Database

We can already display simple views that contain details of our products, but we are still displaying the test data that our mock IProductRepository returns. Before we can implement a real repository, we need to set up a database and populate it with some data.

We are going to use SQL Server as the database, and we will access the database using the Entity Framework (EF), which is the .NET ORM framework. An ORM framework lets us work with the tables, columns, and rows of a relational database using regular C# objects. We mentioned in Chapter 4 that LINQ can work with different sources of data, and one of these is the Entity Framework. You'll see how this simplifies things in a little while.