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Originally Posted by Lemurion
Oddly enough, I'm working on a manuscript right now where the author has done just that; put a period at the end of the quoted speech, and then continue the sentence with the dialogue tag. Naturally, I'm replacing them with commas.
The period would be right if the dialogue was a sentence on it's own, but it's not. It gets the comma because it's only a clause; it doesn't include the main verb.
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You can pretend that there is logic to it, but it's best if you don't look too closely. For example you might then wonder:
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"Why do we do it like this?" he asked.
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Of course, in the desperate search for logic, it might argued that "?" is quite a different thing to a period, in terms of sentence structure. That in classic texts it was not uncommon to see "?" and "!" in the middle of sentences. But such use has dropped out of favour.