The CTP4 release of the "EF Code-First" functionality provides a pretty nice code-centric way to work with data.  It brings with it a lot of productivity, as well as a lot of power.  Hopefully these two blog posts provides a glimpse of some of the possibilities it provides. 

You can download the CTP4 release of EF Code-First here.  To learn even more about "EF Code-First" check out these blog posts by the ADO.NET team:

EF CTP4 Announcement Blog Post

EF CTP4 Productivity Enhancements Blog Post

EF CTP4 Code First Walkthrough Blog Post

DataAnnotations and Code First

Default conventions with Code First

Scott Hanselman’s Walkthrough Post about CTP4

Hope this helps,

Scott

Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu