The best session at the 2005 PASS Summit...

...was probably one I didn't even get to attend. 

Adam Machanic introduced himself to me at the Mercy Wine Bar outing some of us did Thursday night after the VIP Reception in Las Colinas.  He mentioned his "Best Practices for Structured SQL Server Development" presentation and told me a little about it.  It immediately piqued my interest, because it sounded like some of the same things I've been saying for years.  He sent me the deck and supplementary files from the presentation, and I really liked what I saw.  His message is basically that we need to apply some of the same concepts we use to build software in other languages to T-SQL development:  unit testing, assertions, exceptions, etc.  This was the theme of my second SQL Server book, The Guru's Guide to SQL Server Stored Procedures, XML, and HTML, and I couldn't agree more.  Adam's thoughts along these lines are well-reasoned and show some obvious experience building real SQL Server apps.  He also provides some great code to go along with the presentation, including an assertion framework and a unit-test library.  If you didn't get to attend his session at the conference, I suggest you either purchase the conference proceedings or bug Adam directly to see whether he'll give you a copy of his stuff.  Definitely worth a look.