Republished with Permission - Original Article

Last week I blogged about the new Entity Framework 4 “code first” development option.  The EF “code-first” option enables a pretty sweet code-centric development workflow for working with data.  It enables you to:

Develop without ever having to open a designer or define an XML mapping file

Define model objects by simply writing “plain old classes” with no base classes required

Use a “convention over configuration” approach that enables database persistence without explicitly configuring anything

In last week’s blog post I demonstrated how to use the default EF4 mapping conventions to enable database persistence.  These default conventions work very well for new applications, and enable you to avoid having to explicitly configure anything in order to map classes to/from a database. 

In today’s blog post I’m going to discuss how you can override the default persistence mapping rules, and use whatever custom database schema you want.  This is particularly useful for scenarios involving existing databases (whose schema is already defined and potentially can’t be changed) as well as for scenarios where you want your model shape to be different than how you want to persist it within a relational database.