When using LINQ shall we use 3 layers?

Question

When using LINQ to SQL or Entity framework,shall we need to separate application in 3 layers?BLL,DAL,Interface?

Answer 1

Do what works for you. Building a wedding website with a handful of links and getting 5 content pages out of the database? More than 1 layer seems like tremendous overkill. On the flip side, for a very complex or large project: I think you'd want at least some degree separation because it saves time, confusion and sanity.

It matters what you're working on and how much division it requires. Ultimately it's what you and your team prefer. There's no right answer, it's what fits the situation.

Answer 2

in projects I've been developing, I find value in creating a DL even when using Linq2Sql for data access.

My main reason is because many of the calls to the DL, to retreive one or more business objects from the DB, actually require more than one call to the database, especially when implementing an eager-loading strategy. and when saving a business object, whose data is stored in multiple tables, a transaction can be established across multiple calls to the database.

The business layer doesn't need to know that; it should be able to make a single call to the DL and leave it to the DL to do all the tedious querying and collation of data into business objects.

Answer 3

I'm with @MikeJacobs.

I've actually written a LINQ2SQL library which abstracts ALL the DataContext stuff, and all the .Insert(), .Execute() and .SubmitChanges().

It's really nice to just abstract that away. In LINQ2SQL, you're still dependant on all your layers knowing about the LINQ2SQL Entities, but my top layers is very rarely sending complex lambdas to the DAL, most of that's done in the DAL.