ok, i have always envisaged and devloped my .net web apps in 3 tier flavor (presentation, Business Logic, Data Access) but recently i've seen a few articles which have made me re-rhink my thoughts on what a DAL is.
My original thinking was that no layer should know (or care) about an upper layer, i.e. my DAL's never cared about the other layers of my app (not my custom classes or their properties), they accepted scalar values as parameters and returned either dataSets or DbDataReaders to the BLL.
Now i am wondering, should i create a common business object (i.e. class template) layer, and let it be seen by any application tier, and furthermore should i map data returned from stored procs directly in my Data Access tier. i.e. is it acceptable design to pass and receive custom classes into and out of my data access tier?
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