<p>I'm making my way through the early <a href="http://www.asp.net/learn/data-access/?lang=cs" rel="noreferrer">Data Access Tutorials</a> on Microsoft's ASP.NET website and it occurred to me that this all seems awfully similar to what I have read about separating your logic and presentation code using the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-view-controller" rel="noreferrer">MVC pattern</a>. As a newbie I have yet to implement the MVC pattern but I'm curious as to how these two design structures differ and if I should be focusing my attention on one or the other, particularly in the context of web design.</p>

The link you've posted for the Data Access Tutorial is implementation of MVC pattern. MVC pattern is a concept, implementation can differ; you have this in ASP.NET whereas in Java there's one framework called
Struts
, which is an implementation MVC.
DAL & BLL patterns differ from the MVC pattern in terms of concepts; but NOT this specific implementation. MVC is actually achieved through usage of DAL, BLL & View Patterns.