Entity Framework provides a lot of value to the developers, allowing them to use C# or VB.NET code to manipulate database data. However, sometimes we have to drop a level lower, accessing data a bit more directly through views, dynamic SQL statements and/or stored procedures. We can use the ExecuteSqlCommand method to execute any arbitrary SQL code, including raw SQL or stored procedure. We can use the SqlQuery method to retrieve data from a view, stored procedure, or any other SQL statement, and Entity Framework takes care of materializing the data for us, based on the result type we provide. It is important to follow best practices when providing parameters to those two methods to avoid SQL injection vulnerability.

Entity Framework also supports environments where there are requirements to perform all updates to entities via stored procedures. The framework will even write them for us, and we would only need to write one line of code per entity for this type of support, assuming...