Republished with Permission - Original Article

This week the data team released the CTP5 build of the new Entity Framework Code-First library.  EF Code-First 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

Optionally override the convention-based persistence and use a fluent code API to fully customize the persistence mapping

I’m a big fan of the EF Code-First approach, and wrote several blog posts about it this summer:

Code-First Development with Entity Framework 4 (July 16th)

EF Code-First: Custom Database Schema Mapping (July 23rd)

Using EF Code-First with an Existing Database (August 3rd)

Today’s new CTP5 release delivers several nice improvements over the CTP4 build, and will be the last preview build of Code First before the final release of it.  We will ship the final EF Code First release in the first quarter of next year (Q1 of 2011).  It works with all .NET application types (including both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC projects).