Tom, thanks for bringing this up. I was just about to mention XPs since while I agree with the point that Steve and Alan.B (in another post regarding CLR being used in MDS and DQS) are making, we simply don't know what the future holds. But Extended Stored Procedures are a good reference point.

So to answer the related questions from Tom (i.e. "so why shouldn't SQLCLR eventually suffer the same fate?") and Jeff (i.e. "I wonder when they'll deprecate and discontinue SQLCLR"): SQLCLR might get deprecated someday and so what if it does? As it has been pointed out already, XPs were deprecated when SQL Server 2005 came out (9 years ago!) and are still functioning. Any technology that we use can become obsolete at any time, including SQL Server itself. The idea that maybe someday in the future this particular feature might be unavailable is no reason at all (or actually, a bad reason) to not use it today, especially seeing how long it would likely continue to function after the initial deprecation announcement.

CLR Integration was introduced NINE years ago and while not perfect, does allow for some very useful and interesting things to be done without waiting for Microsoft to decide to implement something. In terms of longevity of these solutions, for those of us who have been using it for even close to the past nine years, even if it is deprecated in the next 4 years and continues to function for at least 10 years after that, how can a 23 year time frame be seen as a negative? And that is only 23 years IF they deprecate it, which is not looking likely. Nothing we build is going to last forever, especially within the context of computers, yet we all have a job to get done so why not get it done and move onto the next project? I certainly don't think that those who wrote XPs (prior to adopting SQL Server 2005 or newer) wasted their time or acted contrary to the best interests of their employers given that those solutions should still be functioning. And again, so what if something changes and that project needs to get refactored? What is to say that the project won't need to get refactored anyway due to some other circumstance, prior to XPs (or even SQL CLR) ceasing to function?

Take care,

Solomon..