MVC3 + Simple Membership: Accessing User Profiles Through Entity Framework - asp.net-mvc-3

Question

I'm using the SimpleMembership.MVC3 package with my MVC3 application and I want to be able to access users from the table through Entity Framework
In examples for doing this with MVC4, you can simply create a POCO to mirror the User table that's been generated, add your DbSet in your DbContext implementation and then query the DbSet like you normally would, ie: context.Users.
This collection is always returning 0 items for me even though there are rows in the table. What am I doing wrong? Here's what I got so far:
[Table("User")]
public class User
{
public int Id { get; set; }
public string UserName { get; set; }
public string FirstName { get; set; }
public string LastName { get; set; }
}
public class TestContext : DbContext
{
public DbSet<User> Users { get; set; }
protected override void OnModelCreating(DbModelBuilder modelBuilder)
{
modelBuilder.Conventions.Remove<PluralizingTableNameConvention>();
base.OnModelCreating(modelBuilder);
}
}
In my service:
model.Accounts = context.Users.ToList();
Thanks!

Answer 1

You do not create your a POCO that mirrors the User table in order to access it directly from EF. There is already a POCO created by the Internet template when you created the project, which you can customize as described here. This same article also shows how you can access the user information by accessing EF directly. You do not create your own context, there is one already in place that you use. Here is a code snippet from that article.
var context = new UsersContext();
var username = User.Identity.Name;
var user = context.UserProfiles.SingleOrDefault(u => u.UserName == username);
var email = user.Email;
The article also has links to download the source code that demonstrates the details on how to do this.

Answer 2

I circumvented the membership classes entirely and implemented a pure EF membership system. I leveraged the System.Web.Helpers Crypto helpers to handle password hashing and just create the AuthCookie when needed.