I am wondering what other developers think about combining business
objects
and data access layers components?
Not sure what you mean by 'combining'-- your design seems to put the DALC in
a separate layer from the business objects. To answer the general question,
I would strongly recommend separating the DALC from the BO. That way, if you
switch to/from Access,SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, and so on, you only have to
modify and retest the DALC. In other words, you open a much smaller can of
worms by changing your data access platform-- a day's work, instead of a
week's, with much lower risk of uncaught bugs.