I know that we have all hit that point where we are going into a project, it has existing database structure and some old ADO.NET hand built data access layer. We think maybe this would be a great place for Entity Framework, and then we find that the business objects are serialized over WCF, or that they are somehow used in a way that makes standard EF cry. This is where we have that internal debate on if our boss will accept a week of writing code just to get code first running, not to solving the problem. In comes the EF Power Toys.
Just start up a new project in Visual Studio.
With nuget type Install-Package EntityFramework ( this avoids a bug later )
Right click the project and select Entity Framework Reverse Engineer Code first
Punch in your connection information
Then watch the bottom left side status messages, it will load schema information, create objects and configuration for them.
You should now have a context, an entities folder, and a mappings folder.
This includes every entity in the database and a mapping for every property. It doesn’t leave off properties that could have taken advantage of convention.
You can use this the same way you used a code first context before.
Enjoy.
764f993c-311b-41ee-9742-f1f016a124e6|2|5.0
Data Access, Entity Framework, Productivity, Visual Studio 2010