I was using a hack to turn off the Database Initialization for code first. I didn’t want code first to do the model/database comparison, and found the best way I could figure out…I deleted the EDMMetadata table in the database.

Yes, a total hack.

Sergey Barskiy and Rowan Miller straightened me out.

Even though the custom conventions did not make it into EF 4.1, there are still some controls for the default conventions. I had totally forgotten about this. But this gives you one of the ways to turn of the initialization.

You do this in the OnModelCreating override in the context class:

     protected override void OnModelCreating(DbModelBuilder modelBuilder)
     {
        modelBuilder.Conventions.Remove<IncludeMetadataConvention>();
     }

That’s System.Data.Entity.Infrastructure.IncludeMetadataConvention, if you are curious about which namespace I’m using.

The other way is to set the DbInitialization strategy go null (as opposed to letting code first just use the default “CreateDatabaseWhenNotExist”, or using one of the others e.g. “DropCreateDatabaseWhenModelChanges” or even a custom strategy that you’ve created based on one of the built in strategies.

You typically set DbInitialization strategies at application startup, for example in global.asax for web apps and you do the same even if you are setting it to null.

Here’s an example of how to do that given that I have a context class called BlogContext that inherits from DbContext:

 Database.SetInitializer<BlogContext>(null);

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