I recently decided to upgrade a client's application from Entity Framework version 1 to version 4 (MS skipped a few numbers to make the EF version match the .NET version). The main reason for the upgrade was the client requested a feature to clone an entity. There is no really easy way to clone a complex entity object. The object in this case, Project, has many associations and those associations also have many associations. Here is an image of the Project object in the designer.
And, because I don't want to just copy the associations to the new Project, but instead, create new objects that represent the associations and add those to the new Project while maintaining the original object values I needed to jump through a bunch of hoops.
I was hoping that version 4's inclusion of foreign keys in the generated model would help. By being able to set simple associations by simply setting the foreign key (ID) instead of getting the association object and adding the object to the parent. The clone method (actually I am using a copy constructor) was already going to be quite long, so I was hoping this upgrade would simplify things a bit.
However, there is NO way to upgrade a model and have the designer automatically add the foreign keys. I am sure I am not the only developer that is looking to upgrade existing code specifically to take advantage of the foreign key inclusion of EF 4. Hopefully, with some help from the community or Microsoft this process can be easier in the future.