Why has MS decided to use convention over configuration.
I deal with very large projects and not all projects are data centric. In fact, even with data centric projects, my entity classes have a lot of custom functionality that needs to be persistence agnostic.
With the current MSM approach, I end up having to apply attributes to non-persistence properties instead of the other way around. Shouldn't that be the point of code-first? To use a working class hierarchy and turn it into persistence compatible as an 'addition'?
I understand that some conventions are very useful such as the naming of Identity or primary key properties and foreign keys. But honestly, tell me how many developers would use code-first instead of model-first if they did NOT already have a class structure???
You don't need to use any persistence dependent attributes in your classes. EF code first uses model configuration to define mapping - that configuration is either defined directly in OnModelCreating method of your derived DbContext or in separate configuration classes per every your entity and complex type. Attributes are just shortcuts converted to these configurations.