I'm using the Linq to Entities. I've got my main table, Employee setup with a field named vendorID. Vendor ID is a foreign key into the Vendors table.

As it is right now, the Employee object does not directly expose the vendorID. Instead, I can only access it this way:

var employee = (from e in context.Employees.Include("tbl_vendors")
               where e.employeeID = 1
               select e).FirstOrDefault();

//this gets the vendor ID
int vendorID = employee.tbl_vendors.vendorID;

That is just fine and dandy, but it is extra work on the database because it is forcing a join where none is needed. Is there a way to get that key value without being forced to do a join to the tbl_vendors table?