.Net - accessing multiple sql server groups / databases

Question

My program (WCF service programed in C#) has to access multiple sql server groups and the databases within those groups (sql server). It looks like linq 2 sql definitely doesn't support this unless I create multiple dataclasses per database, and it looks like the entity framework is in the same boat.

How would you go about setting up your application that has to access multiple sql server groups that are not linked?

I suppose I could just use SqlConnection and SqlCommand and create some classes to handle it. If I go this route how would I go about populating my model classes with the result of the query? (I don't want to use datatables, but rather List<T>)

I.E.

Server1
 - database 1
 - database 2
Server2
 - database 3
 - database 4

My program has to access database 1 and database 4, and they're not linked / will not be linked.

Answer 1

You can use EF or LinqToSql to access each DB. Your service will work like broker. It will collect results from different databases and constructs DTOs with complete data.

Edit:

If you have SPs with same name you can reuse single EF model. If you have SPs with different names you can create model for each database. The entities will be actually same so you can use POCO approach (only EF 4.0) which maps entity from model to your POCO class. POCO class will be used by all models.