Custom Build Providers

I came across this blog entry from Fritz Onion today about an experience that he had with Custom Build Providers:

    http://pluralsight.com/blogs/fritz/archive/2004/09/06/2188.aspx

It's a very interesting proposition and I really do wonder how things such as this will really get used into the future.  In Fritz's example he uses it to derive a strongly typed - and therefore intellisensed - experience at design time.  That's cool but, in that case it's really no different to any code-spitter tool.  It's just that the cost of parsing and code-gen has moved away from a separate code-gen tool into the IDE.  There's really no great gain though as you still need some tool to build the .dal tool (using the example case) and you still need to write code to emit code. 

Of couse, that's not to say that my jaw wouldn't have dropped too! ;-)