I previously blogged about my fears that making the .NET languages available in Yukon might lead to horrible stored procedures by people who don't understand the difference between set-based and iterative processing. I am still worried about that, but I just read a blog entry by Greg Linwood that talks more about using the .NET languages in lieu of extended stored procedures and COM. Okay, I can accept that and see value in it. We get a lot of questions on SQLTeam about sending email from SQL Server without using SQLMail (usually because they don't have an Exchange Server. There are a few articles on SQLTeam about how to do that in SQL 7 or 2000. But I could imagine it might be easier / better to do this with a .NET assembly instead of, for example, the sp_OA calls. On the other hand, I read somewhere that SQLMail was changed in Yukon to allow sending SMTP mail without an Exchange Server, so maybe this whole example I cooked up is already obsolete.
Ah well... time will tell. Can't say I personally have had any real need to do COM or XPs yet anyway, so it might all just be a moot point for me.