EF “code first” enables us to use “plain old CLR objects” (aka POCO) to represent entities within a database.  This means that we do not have to derive our model classes from a base class, nor implement any interfaces or attributes on them.  This enables us to keep our model classes clean and “persistence ignorant”.

Above we’ve defined two POCO classes - “Product” and “Category” – that we’ll use to represent the “Products” and “Categories” tables within our Northwind database.  The properties on these two classes map to columns within the tables.  Each instance of a Product or Category class represents a row within the respective database tables.