 <p>Honestly, no or at least not that I've run across. Whether you use your data (EF) models for the MVC model or not in either case you're going to have to decorate a bunch of classes (properties) with the attributes. </p> <p>Personally I generally insert a business layer between my DAL (EF/NHibernate/etc.) and my UI layer (MVC) so my models in the UI are different from persistence. But I still end up with just as many (if not more) model classes with attributes as I have for the DAL.</p> <p>This may not help in your situation but you may want to take a look at the new validation features coming with the next version of <a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/12/10/class-level-model-validation-with-ef-code-first-and-asp-net-mvc-3.aspx" rel="nofollow">EF</a> and see if the will help you any.</p>