Entity Framework: Data Centric vs. Object Centric

Question

I'm having a look at Entity Framework and everything I'm reading takes a data centric approach to explaining EF. By that I mean that the fundamental relationships of the system are first defined in the database and objects are generated that reflect those relationships.

Examples

Quickstart (Entity Framework)

Using Entity Framework entities as business objects?

The EF documentation implies that it's not necessary to start from the database layer, e.g.

Developers can work with a consistent application object model that can be mapped to various storage schemas

When designing a new system (simplified version), I tend to first create a class model, then generate business objects from the model, code business layer stuff that can't be generated, and then worry about persistence (or rather work with a DBA and let him worry about the most efficient persistence strategy). That object centric approach is well supported by ORM technologies such as (n)Hibernate.

Is there a reasonable path to an object centric approach with EF? Will I be swimming upstream going that route? Any good starting points?

Answer 1

Model First approach seems to be what you need.
We suggest to take a look at the ADO.NET Team Blog article also.

Answer 2

A while after asking this, I discovered that EF 4 supports POCO (Plain Old CLR Objects), allowing an object-centric design with (relative) ignorance of persistence.

This article was the best one I came across discussing that approach, while this article explains how to use code generation templates to ease the work.