Including child Objects in Entityframework

Include doesn't work with projection. Moreover it is not needed. Just do this:

var query = context.Persons
                   .Select(x => new PersonDto
                       {
                          Id = x.pkid, 
                          FirstName = x.FirstName,
                          Address = x.Address
                       });

Few points here:

• No Include
• Address accessed directly in projection, EF will handle this
• I'm using PersonDto as target of projection. PersonDto has just Id, FirstName and Address.
• You can project to custom type or anonymous type but you cannot project to entity type (the mapped type) - it doesn't work and it throws exception.
• If you want to use mapped type you can't return only selected scalar columns - all columns will always be loaded. Only navigation properties can be loaded selectively. To overcome this people sometimes use Table splitting but that is something which works if you can divide your big entity into disjunct entities. In your scenario use just projection.