In the pre-LINQ days, I used to use the classical 3-tiers architecture for designing ASP.NET web projects, the user interface (UI), the business logic layer (BLL) and the data access layer (DAL).

My DAL layer used to rely on Microsoft’s Data Access Application Block (DAAB) which abstracted the repetitive and boring ADO.NET implementations. There are some 3rd party tools such as SubSonic, which has some common features with LINQ, or NHibernate, however, I would rather use the enterprise library.

Let me quickly illustrate the way to solve a problem with the classical architecture. This is a simple business problem, a website that has many brands and each brand has an advertising campaign. To access the campaign stats, which are supplied by the campaign agency, we need to access the agency’s webservice by providing our brand credentials. We simply store these login credentials in our database -> retrieve login info of a brand -> call the webservice -> display the stats on a web page.

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I redesigned my website, adhered to the XHTML standards, validated on the W3C validator and everything went alright, now the last step, cross-browsers compatibility tests.

First step, I need to look at the previous stats to learn what browsers are support-worthy. And? Surprise, surprise! IE6 is still alive with quarter of the IE users! But why?! My blog is targeted at the IT pros which are expected to be on modern browsers.

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