After reverse engineering code first, I got entity classes and mapping. Most of the business classes (that I already have) have the same name as entity classes and most of the properties in entity and business classes are the same.
If I understand the implementation right, I should make partial classes with entity classes having all the properties and change the business classes by removing those properties and leaving only the business rules.
If that is correct, what to do about derived classes? Obviously entity classes need all properties from base class. Can I change the code in the entity classes so that the entity classes also inherit from the base classes?
Any thoughts would be welcome.
Perhaps you should remove your business classes. ORM is tool for loading and persisting objects – you don’t have special set of objects for persistence and special set of objects for business logic. Use single set which consists of persisted properties and computed properties + business rules executed on persisted properties (store them in partial class). That will form something which is commonly called domain object – it has both data and logic related to its data. You can have separate classes performing logic on multiple domain objects (so the logic doesn’t belong to the object itself). These classes are commonly called domain services.