I have a homemade project combining with application and database. Today I'm using architecture N-tier. Totally I have 4 project in my solution in VS2010. The fourth project is a transaction layer that connect all the 3 project (one for presentation, business logic and database layer) in order to retrieve data from the database and all the way to present the data in presentation layer.

Transaction layer contains entity framework 4 + customized class to carry data to the presentation layer.

I always use LINQ to retrieve data in database layer.

From my experience, everytime I use LINQ in relation with entity framework it always take a lot of time to retrieve data because what I believe is that my entity framework always has to reload everytime when I want to retrieve any data from the database.

My question for you guys is:

When you create your application connecting to a database, what architecture do you use? How do you retrieve the data from you application? Is it entity framework etc?