Instantiate While Remaining De-coupled?

Just a bit of an issue that we're trying to resolve here. Assuming We're implementing a business model as one dll and a data access layer as another dll. We want them to be de-coupled so we implement an interface for the data-access layer. Great, we could now swap out the data access layer and, as long as the new data access layer fulfils the interface we're good to go, right?

Except we're not. In the business model we need to insanciate the data access layer and, because you can't instanciate an interface, you have to instanciate the actual class. We need to know the name space and the class name.We're going to end up with a line of code somewhere in our business model that looks something like this:-

Dim test as iDataLayer

test = new namespace.DataLayer

Basically, we can declare test as an iDataLayer (the interface) but to instanciate it we need to refer to the actual class (DataLayer). So we haven't really removed the coupling. If we want to swap out the data layer for a different implementation with a possibly different class name or namespace then we need to ammend the code in the business model. We're trying to avoid that.

So far the best we can come up with is to use the activate instance method instead of the New keyword (Late Binding). Because that takes a string we could hold the namespace and classname in a config file or similar, so swapping out one component wouldn't invalidate the others, you'd just need to update the config. That's just our home-spun solution though and I can't help feeling there are betters ways out there.