It wasn't me, but Robyn,

Robyn Page's SQL Server Cursor Workbench (24 January 2007 -http://www.simple-talk.com/sql/learn-sql-server/robyn-pages-sql-server-cursor-workbench/)[/url]

'--and here is a very different technique that takes advantage of the quirky behavior of SET in an UPDATE command in SQL Server'.

... it is an old Sybase SQL Server trick which has been around the SSC forums for years. The only problems I've ever had was when using this together with concatenation. In SQL Server 2000, one occasionally needed to add a blank string to the expression, but they fixed it in 2005.

Microsoft may huff and puff and say that the technique is unsupported but it is all wind. If they changed the behavior of UPDATE now, all sorts of systems dating back over the past decade wouldn't be upgradeable to the new version. Because the technique gets more and more important as the database size increases, I've seen it in complex financial systems at the heart of international companies. Microsoft Marketing Department would soon put a stop to the hotheads.

I have to agree with Jeff about sp_makewebtask. It was useless for its original purpose of putting out web-based reports, but it was a gloriously simple way of making regular spreadsheet-based reports, and we all used it as such. I don't think that Microsoft really did much research before they deprecated it.