This talk is the tale of a journey from a relational data model to a graph based one. It is a story of love, hard won wisdom, and occasional frustration. Some parts were beautifully simple and almost magical, while others quickly turned into the familiar “oh no… EF used to do this for us, didn’t it?” Along the way we will look at the real code and infrastructure that made those moments possible.

Most of us in the .NET world grow up thinking in tables, keys, and LINQ to Everything. Even if SQL Server and Entity Framework are not everyone’s favourite companions, they are still where many of us end up. So when my team left MS SQL and T-SQL behind and moved to Neo4j and Cypher, it felt like stepping off the relational map into unfamiliar ground armed only with years of C#, a rough sense of direction, and enough confidence to make any reasonable architect uneasy.

We will explore the technical pieces we had to build ourselves, the EF features we only discovered we relied on once they disappeared, and the patterns, queries, and pitfalls involved in making Neo4j feel natural in a .NET ecosystem. Some discoveries made us smile. Others made us question our life choices. And yes, there are fewer JOINs down this path, but it comes with a price as always.