Entity Framework Core Cookbook - Second Edition

Generating entities from the database

Entity Framework Core 1.0 supports two different workflows:

• Code first: Entities are first generated as code and only then is the database generated. This follows the Domain Driven Design (DDD) approach.
• Database first: We already have a database and we want to generate entities for it.

The first approach was made popular when Entity Framework 4.1 "Code First" was released. The idea here is that we, as C# developers, understand code better than anything, and so we model our entities as code. It is left for Entity Framework to produce the database objects (tables, relations, and so on) that will enable it to persist our data in an almost transparent way.

But what happens when you have an existing (legacy or otherwise) ...