Difference between POCO, Code First, and simple EF approach

All these three approaches define how much control you want on your Entity Framework code. Entity Framework is an OR mapper, it generates a lot of code, it creates your middle tier (Entity), and Data Access layer (Context).

But a lot of times you want to enjoy the benefits of both worlds, you want the auto-generation part to minimize your development time and you want control on the code so that you can maintain code quality.

Below is the difference table which defines each of the approaches. In simple Entity Framework, everything is auto generated and so you need the EDMX XML file as well. POCO is semi-automatic so you have full control on the entity classes but then the context classes are still generated by the EDMX file.

In Code First, you have complete control on how you can create the entity and context classes. Because you are going to manually create these classes, you do not have dependency on the EDMX XML file. Below is a simple table which shows the cross comparison.

	EDMX	Entity	Context
Simple entity framework	Needed	Auto	Auto
POCO approach	Needed	Manual	Auto
Code First	Not Needed	Manual	Manual

 

CSDL, SSDL and MSL sections in an EDMX file

• CSDL (Conceptual Schema definition language) is the conceptual abstraction which is exposed to the application.
• SSDL (Storage Schema Definition Language) defines the mapping with your RDBMS data structure.
• MSL (Mapping Schema Language) connects the CSDL and SSDL.

CSDL, SSDL and MSL are actually XML files.