ASP.NET Multitenant Applications

Many line of business applications are designed to work with multiple customers. It is important to secure the data so that customer data isn’t “leaked” or seen by other customers and potential competitors. These applications are classified as “multi-tenant” because each customer is considered a tenant of the application with their own set of data.


  1. Open a connection to the database,
  2. Create a DataSet to fetch or submit the data to the database, and
  3. Convert data from the DataSet to .NET objects or vice-versa to apply business rules.
This was a cumbersome and error prone process. Microsoft has provided a framework called “Entity Framework” (EF) to automate all these database related activities for your application. It enables developers to work with data using objects of domain specific classes without focusing on the underlying database tables and columns where this data is stored.

EF Core is the successor to EF, but it is a complete rewrite and is not backwards compatible with previous versions of EF. The figure shows the process that EF Core goes through the first time you use your application’s DbContext.

The following prerequisites are required for an EF Core project:


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