Entity Framework
I ended up going with setting up Entity Framework first. I found a good tutorial that stepped through all the basics. I wish I had seen this a year ago when I first started using EF. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkJ9keBmQWo&feature=youtu.be I really recommend watching the video for all the details. I'm going to capture the hints that were helpful to me so I don't forget them. Setup 1. Create "ASP.NET Core Web Application" Web Application in Visual Studio. This will create a Razor Pages application so we have a framework 2. Create a "Class Library (.NET Standard)" project for Data layer .NET Standard project will work with .Net Framework, .Net Core, Xamarin, etc. .Net Core projects won't work with .Net Framework 3. Use NuGet to add "Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.SqlServer" to the Data layer 4. Create a constructor that inherits from DbContext. Ctor should pass in DbContextOptions and call base(options). Create