My rambling thoughts on exploring the .NET framework and related technologies
Not my invention, and not that new, but I’m surprised at how many developers haven’t come across these.
Read about the disappearing Heisenbug, the reliable Bohrbug, the complex Mandelbug, the frustrating Schrödinbug, the disastrous Hindenbug and the elusive Higgs-bugson!
Note:  This assumes you have read and understood the fab articles How to turbocharge your Entity Framework queries - Part 1  and Knowing the difference between IEnumerable<T> and IQueryable<T> . If not, please read them first.
It is important to understand where your code is executed when querying with Entity Framework, as this can make a big difference to the time required to execute your queries.
Like many, our database has rather a lot of naughty nullable columns that really should be non-nullable, so we end up with null data issues all over the place. One way to avoid this is to modify the property in the .edmx file to add a default value. However, this is slow and painful, and easy to forget.
As there is no use case we can foresee where you would want a null string property, we have taken the step of adding a constructor to the entity (generated in the T4 template) that initialises every string property to an empty string. This means that whenever you create a new entity, any string properties will be initialised, avoiding any null values.
However, this leaves you with a problem if you want to set a (non-empty) default value for a string.
Many of the extension methods that we use have a signature that takes an Expression<Func<TSource, bool>> rather than just a Func<TSource, bool> ? Ever wondered why? Do you even know what the difference is? No, nor do most people, but it's worth getting to know, as it can be useful.
A few (hopefully) useful links to debugging tactics that aren't so well known, but are extremely powerful.