public class CollectionDetail { public int Id { get; set; } ... public
MachineField MachineField { get; set; } } 

I would then later write LINQ code that would end up retrieving these objects. The problem was MachineField was always set to null. I banged my head on this for a long time looking at everything I could think of. Finally, after looking at the CollectionDetail class one more time, I noticed that other Foreign Key objects were marked with virtual, and I remembered that I removed virtual while I was trying to test whether or not the object's lazy load behavior. All of the documentation clearly states that you need to mark this virtual. Once I added the virtual keyword back, everything worked exactly as it should have.