The Entity Framework Team released the Entity Framework Feature CTP 1, which appears to give you a less invasive Entity Framework in the domain layer of your applications by allowing you to use the Entity Framework using POCO Entities without a visual designer while still getting the benefits of self-tracking. I haven't tried this as of yet, so I cannot comment on the implementation. Unfortunately this will not be a part of the .NET Framework 4.0. This will require a separate download when everything is fully released.
The features included in this CTP are :
- Templates for Self-Tracking Entities (N-Tier support)
- Templates for POCO (Plain Old CLR Objects) Entities
- Code-Only Programming Model that allows you to write Entity Data Model based applications without requiring external artifacts
Download it here.