As certain other “highly integrated” Microsoft technologies, entity framework seems to be high maintenance when it comes to refactoring and moving things around.

To move an .emdx file from one project to another, one needs to:

• Move the file itself
• Add a bunch of assembly references to the project and to the system.web/compilation/assemblies section of the web.config
• Add at least three (3) special connection strings where the name of your model file, including the namespace is repeated about a dozen times, along with the name of your DB server and database.

DRY (don’t repeat yourself) clearly does not apply here