EF 4.1 Code First error - The entity type SomeType is not part of the model for the current context

Question

While working with EF code first I get error given below at different times:

The entity type SomeType is not part of the model for the current context.

Answer 1

Answering the question is "What are the possible causes of this error?":

This error seems to occur any time the internal/EDMX model is not successfully built, or is not completely built. And there are a large potential number of causes for this problem. It's unfortunate that there seems to be insufficient error reporting or error detection when building the model, so solving it seems to involve trying a bunch of things to see what makes the problem go away.

I ran into another instance of this error over the past few days, using EF 6.0 (currently pre-release code), code-first, and custom conventions. It turns out that the root cause is that I had a custom convention which renames the ID EdmProperty (eg ID -> MyTypeId). If I disabled my custom convention this problem went away; if I enabled my convention the problem occurs. There is no logging or exceptions or other errors to indicate that a problem occurred when the building the model. This exception doesn't rear its head until I try to add an entity to a DbSet. The convention didn't cause any problem when generating the database (via Migrations).