In my experience building web applications, I've always used a n-tier approach. A DAL that gets data from the db and populates the objects, and BLL that gets objects from the DAL and performs any business logic required on them, and the website that gets it's display data from the BLL. I've recently started learning LINQ, and most of the examples show the queries occurring right from the Web Application code-behinds(it's possible that I've only seen overly simplified examples). In the n-tier architectures, this was always seen as a big no-no.In my experience building web applications, I'v