I am going do do a series of .net or programming related rants. These are confessions regarding things that no one has been able to answer in way that makes sense to me.

When you are building a non-trivial app in .net why would you let entity framework design your tables for you. I can see doing it at the very beginning but once you data is being used by other apps or you have several devs working on the app, it just causes more trouble than it is worth. Besides does not hurt to know how to design a database anyway. Once people let ef design their database they come to me to help them fix it. It is not that hard to design the database by hand and make entity classes by hand. I guess people are into it because they do similar things in other languages. It is probably ok for isolated apps but I have done most of my programming in fairly big companies where data was shared between many apps and we need to make sure we did not break other apps. We were very thoughtful regarding database changes. Just a change in datatype could break several other apps and we would be canned if we did not consider and plan around those breaking changes.

Rant Number 2 - I love and hate code reviews. The reasoning around them are completely logical; however there is a broken element about them. It revolves around a developer improving their skills. Is a pull request or formal code review a good place to let someone know they are lacking or could that better be handled prior to the code review with training or less public code reviews prior to the real code review. Pair programming also helps with this issue but management freaks when they see two devs working on the same peice of code.

Rant # 3- How can a mid or senior level dev move to the next level? There is a need for mentoring or coaching but people don't seem willing to understand that all devs are in need of improvement, not just junior devs. I have tried to find a coding coach or mentor. I am just on my own reading books and stack overflow. I would love to have a real person to work with.

@georgelynch I always build DB manually and use ef for accessing.

@philcr Me too and I have never had a problem with it but I work with people now who refuse to listen when I tell them it is actually easier to do it yourself.

@georgelynch luckily I don't have others on .net projects just me.