Is there any way to make local mode more user-friendly?

[WreckedAvent]

The way local mode currently works, the properties for entites are only saved locally if and only if you do a fresh build with no local mode, refresh the project, and then re-enable local mode. This seems pretty arcane and not intuitive and makes it much harder to sell to teams when doing a normal rebuild can sometimes result in a janked local file that has no local properties for entites (if for example, there's some cleaning of auto-gen'd files).

Can this generation process be called another way so it's at least automate-able and therefore idiot proof?

[Thorium]

This is an interesting question. I guess I would still go for local development databases, or shared test-environment databases, instead of doing most development against the context schema cache.

Context schema cache is great if you need to build without connection to database.

But if you have a production database, and dev-team needs to implement a feature X that needs addition of a new non-nullable-column to the database, how do you manage the database compatibility between different source code branches?

If you have a local database (or shared between the dev team) separate of the real production database, there are lot more tools available for you to create migration sql scripts between the different databases, and the migration scripts can be stored to version control.