Best design practices for .NET architecture with LINQ to SQL (DAL necessary? Can we truly use POCOs? Design pattern to adopt?)

Question

I was avoiding writing what may seem like another thread on .net arch/n-tier architecture, but bear with me.

I, hopefully like others still am not 100% satisfied or clea

Answer 1

When I looked at Rob Connery's Storefront, it looked like he is using POCOs and Linq to SQL; However, he is doing it by translating from the Linq to SQL created entities to POCO (and back), which seems a little silly to me - Essentially we have a DAL for a DAL.

However, this appears to be the only way to use POCOs with Linq to SQL.

I would say you should use a Repository pattern, let it hide your Linq to SQL layer(or whatever you end up using for data access). That doesn't mean you can't use Linq in the other tiers, just make sure your repository returns IQueryable.