Question

EF 4.1 CodeFirst looks great. It works and sells wonderfuly with basic examples that have one or two joins, but what about larger applications? Did anybody work on a large application where domain and data access layers were implemented with EF 4.1 code first? Did it work? Was it as easy and smooth as examples on asp.net site? I’m mainly working on MVC applications, where there is no change tracking. So far I have been using LINQ-to-SQL, which worked well with some extra mapping code.

Thank you

Answer 1

I’m in the later stages of developing a web application that is fairly complex with EF 4.1 CodeFirst (well its more complex than most examples). I don’t pretend to be an expert on code first so others may have different opinions.

I used a domain driven approach along with the repository pattern. The database created by code first worked well though I had to manually optimize the database and add indexes etc. Did have an issue bolting on mvc-profiler but nothing drastic.

There was a learning curve but I reckon that was more down to my lack of knowledge about code-first than anything intrinsically difficult about it. When we started developing the app the ability to recreate a db and seed it sped things up at the start. Though we have disabled that now and any db changes are made manually and the code is updated.

So for me code first worked well, I like this approach for new applications and it wasnt too difficult to get up and running (lots of reading up).