Install with NuGet or from the Visual Studio Marketplace

Complete documentation in Github Pages

This Visual Studio 2017 extension adds a new file type (.efmodel) that allows for fast, easy and, most importantly, visual design of persistent classes. Inheritance, unidirectional and bidirectional associations are all supported. Enumerations are also included in the visual model, as is the ability to add text blocks to explain potentially arcane parts of your design.

While giving you complete control over how the code is generated you'll be able to, out of the box, create sophisticated, consistent and correct Entity Framework code that can be regenerated when your model changes. And, since the code is written using partial classes, any changes you make to your generated code are retained across subsequent generations.

If you are used to the EF visual modeling that comes with Visual Studio, you'll be pretty much at home. The goal was to duplicate at least those features and, in addition, add all the little things that should have been there. Things like:

• the ability to show and hide parts of the model
• easy customization of generated output
• class and enumeration nodes that can be colored to visually group the model
• different concerns being generated into different subdirectories (entities, enums, dbcontext)
• entities by default generated as partial classes so the default code can be easily modified
• string length, index flags, required attributes and other properties being available in the designer

and many other nice-to-have bits.

Code generation is completely customizable via T4 templates. The tool installs templates that target both EF6 and EFCore, and generate both a code-first DbContext class and POCO entity classes. The EF6 template's DbContext code is written to allow consumption in ASP.Net Core in addition to any other project type, so you'll have flexibility in your development.

You can read more about how to use the designer in the Documentation site.

1.2.0 [ RC ]

• New Features
  • Roslyn-based code analysis now allows dragging C# files onto the design surface to add or update classes and enums
  • Can add INotifyPropertyChanged interface and implementation for entities
  • Ability to tag model as a specific EF version (especially useful for EF Core as new capabilities are being added often)
  • Support for dependent (complex/owned) types
  • Option to generate dependent types in a separate directory
  • Output directory overrides for classes and enums
  • On model save, can optionally automatically install EF NuGet packages for the model's EF type and version
  • Context menu action to expand and collapse selected classes and enums
• Enhancements
  • Added ability to add/edit enum values via text in the same way properties can be added/edited in classes
  • Property grid hides element properties if they're not appropriate for the EF version
  • Inheritance strategy automatically changes to table-per-hierarchy if targeting EF Core
  • Context property Database Type changed to SqlServer Type to better reflect what it does
  • Selecting an element in the Model Explorer highlights it on the diagram

1.1.0

• Bug fixes for exceptions thrown when bad input to model attributes as text
• Added MinLength string property (used in EF6 only as of this writing)
• Modified attribute parser to accept MinLength
• Added ColumnName property to model attribute
• Added MEF extension capability
• Added some unit tests
• Added some documentation updates
• Changed version to 1.1.0 due to MEF capability