EF Design Post: POCO template generation options

It has been some time since the last time my team posted anything to the Entity Framework Design blog. The truth is we have been extremely busy finishing the work on Entity Framework 4.

It feels great to be almost done! And now one of my favorite phases of the product cycle begins, again... How to best address the needs of our customers with the people we have, in the time we have, with the highest quality we can achieve? How do we test this design? How do we implement this hard piece? How do we make the API make sense as a whole?

As we start putting together more design ideas, we will need to validate them more often with our customers. In those lines, today we published an article that describes some ideas we have on where we could go with the T4 templates we use for code generation, and in particular with the POCO template.

My favorite idea is by far is the “generate once” experience, because I find myself most of the time just using code-gen to create a starting point with me, and when possible, I prefer to extend my own POCO classes (i.e. adding data annotation attributes, new methods and properties) in the same code file, without having to resort to partial classes.

And you, what would you like to see us do with templates in the next release?