I built a large project with code first using MS MVC (a couple of years ago) and felt that I addressed one of the major problems in programming. One of my basic rules of project development has been YOU BETTER GET YOUR DATABASE DESIGNED FIRST OR YOU WILL REALLY DESTABILIZE THE APP WHEN YOU MAKE CHANGES TO THE DB MIDSTREAM. Sometimes, however, you just don't have that luxury and Code First really helps in that scenario. With code first you focus on your classes and so you can work and think at a truly theoretical level. Changes to classes and new classes migrate to the DB at the push of a button and so there is never any lag between design and implementation when making design changes. That is the high level view. You are free to work and think at a class level. The companion to code first is LINQ. With code first and LINQ you can literally design and built a complex system and never even look at the database. It is a very cool experience. There are some considerations. The key one is test data. When you 'recycle' your DB after class / design changes you often need to migrate test data. When I was working on my code first project, MS had some data migration hooks but I just ended up building a routine to re-populate the test data. I am sure it is better now. I felt Code First was a useful technique when building a system from the ground up.

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I am missing something. How do we insert a code block in an article? I understand that we need the pre block but do we need to go through the code and remove all the special characters like the '>'? Thanks for any help.