EF 4 - Lazy Loading Without Proxies

Question

I´ve read that proxies are used when wee need to use Lazy Loading and Change Tracking. In other words, to use Lazy Loading I must enable proxies.

So far so good.

Answer 1

When using POCO entities with the built-in features of Entity Framework, proxy creation must be enabled in order to use lazy loading. So, with POCO entities, if ProxyCreationEnabled is false, then lazy loading won't happen even if LazyLoadingEnabled is set to true.

With certain types of legacy entities (notably those the derive from EntityObject) this was not the case and lazy loading would work even if ProxyCreationEnabled is set to false. But don't take that to mean you should use EntityObject entities--that will cause you more pain.

The ProxyCreationEnabled flag is normally set to false when you want to ensure that EF will never create a proxy, possibly because this will cause problems for the type of serialization you are doing.

The LazyLoadingEnabled flag is normally used to control whether or not lazy loading happens on a context-wide basis once you have decided that proxies are okay. So, for example, you might want to use proxies for change tracking, but switch off lazy loading.