How to set default values for string properties without having them overridden by our initialising code
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.