How to resolve Warning : The element 'entityFramework' has invalid child element 'providers'. List of possible elements expected: 'contexts'

Question

I'm playing around with EF different workflows. Yesterday I made a new project and Entity Framework 6 was the first suggestion from Nuget so I decided to give it a try, also it is a very small project entirely for learning purposes so I guess it will be good experience to try EF 6 since I've been working mostly with Ef 5.

My Application is based on Code First approach. The structure of the solution is shown in the print screen:

The project CodeFirstClasses is meant to hold my Entites. For simplicity purposes and because I follow a tutorial I use only one class as you may see - Customer.cs. There I have :

public class RewardContext : DbContext
    { 
        //Specify the name of the base as Rewards
        public RewardContext() : base("Rewards")
        { 
        }

        //Create a database set for each data item
        public DbSet<Purchase> Purchases { get; set; }
        public DbSet<Customer> Customers { get; set; }

    }

And the other classes - Purchase and Customer which are trivial, so I won't paste them here.

The other project as you can see is Windows Forms project with just one form and button on it. On the click event of the button I have all the logic for adding new records to my two entities hardcoded. Here is just a part of it:

    //some code...
    //Add the record and save it
    context.Customers.Add(newCustomer);
    context.Purchases.Add(newPurchase);
    context.SaveChanges();

    MessageBox.Show("Record Added!");

So far nothing different from what I'm used to with EF 5. I can build the project, I can run it, and everything is executed as expected. However I get this warning from the title :

Warning 1 The element 'entityFramework' has invalid child element 'providers'. List of possible elements expected: 'contexts'. And even though I'm using mostly MS SQL Server Management Studio I've noticed that I'm not able to manage my connections/databases from the IDE - Visual Studio 2012, but this was not an issue with EF 5.

My research narrowed down the possible source of problem/solution to manually changing the App.config file, but this is an area where I haven't got much experience especially when the IDE took care of it until EF 6. So I'll post both my App.config files for this solution :

The one from the CodeFirstClasses project :

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<configuration>
  <configSections>
    <!-- For more information on Entity Framework configuration, visit http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=237468 -->
    <section name="entityFramework" type="System.Data.Entity.Internal.ConfigFile.EntityFrameworkSection, EntityFramework, Version=6.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" requirePermission="false" />
  </configSections>
  <entityFramework>
    <defaultConnectionFactory type="System.Data.Entity.Infrastructure.SqlConnectionFactory, EntityFramework" />
    <providers>
      <provider invariantName="System.Data.SqlClient" type="System.Data.Entity.SqlServer.SqlProviderServices, EntityFramework.SqlServer" />
    </providers>
  </entityFramework>
</configuration>

And from my TestCodeFirst project:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<configuration>
  <configSections>
    <!-- For more information on Entity Framework configuration, visit http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=237468 -->
    <section name="entityFramework" type="System.Data.Entity.Internal.ConfigFile.EntityFrameworkSection, EntityFramework, Version=6.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" requirePermission="false" />
  </configSections>
  <startup>
    <supportedRuntime version="v4.0" sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.5" />
  </startup>
  <entityFramework>
    <defaultConnectionFactory type="System.Data.Entity.Infrastructure.SqlConnectionFactory, EntityFramework" />
    <providers>
      <provider invariantName="System.Data.SqlClient" type="System.Data.Entity.SqlServer.SqlProviderServices, EntityFramework.SqlServer" />
    </providers>
  </entityFramework>
</configuration>

And the other possible solution that I found is : updating the xsd for "validating" EF config section in web/app.config file to recognize newly added EF6 elements which I'm also not aware of how exactly to do it.

Even though when I open the MS SQL Server Management Studio I see the database created for this application, the records are saved and generally it seems to work but yet I would like to resolve this warning and get to know how to set up my applications based on EF 6 right.

Answer 1

You can install the EF6 Designer for VS2012 from here and it will update the schema that validates config files.

Answer 2

The configuration schema was changed from version 5 to 6. As it says, the providers node was replaced with a contexts node.

The idea is that you can configure the providers individually instead of all contexts using the same provider. (This goes in tandem with being able to have multiple contexts that reside within one database. This used to be called multi-tenant but was later renamed to be more concise)