At my current workplace, Entity Framework 5 is used for all data access/manipulation.
It is a database-first approach using the model designer to add/edit/delete/update entities.
Problem
We now have tons of tables and this is becoming a nightmare to update. The model is very convoluted and it can sometimes crash the IDE. I'm not super clued up on the Entity Framework side of things, but surely this isn't the recommended approach. I have never liked the designer from the beginning. WYSIWYG-like designers spell trouble in my eyes.
Solution?
Structural changes to the database are essentially done by DBAdmins so we can't do code-first (anyway, I prefer not to have database tables generated).
Is there a better approach to this? Shouldn't we be using an XML-based mapper instead of using the designer. What about code-first to the existing database?