title: Is it acceptable practice to reference entity framework assembly from the BI layer?
body: <p>If EF model(s) are contained in a separate assembly and referenced/used by the Data Access Layer for all DB operations, is it acceptable to also reference that same assembly with EF model(s) from the Business Intelligence layer in order to simplify the data transfer from DAL to BI layer?</p>
  
  <p>This would allow for elimination of DTO objects or in my case <code>Tuples</code> I use to transport the data from DAL to BI since the DAL could just return EF objects that BI would already "know" about. The question is if this would be frowned upon from the architecture stand point as something that is going against the separation of concerns or some other rule of good software design?</p>