>There are plenty of examples, but I need to run right now. If you would not find them, I'll look them up tonight.
>
>Naomi, I found them, and I found some of the specific threads on MSDN you and Erland and others participated in a few years back.
>
>Second, the specific issue with ORDER BY is if you use expressions in the ORDER BY - which I rarely use and I'd venture a guess most people who are using aggregation concatenation aren't using. But that was interesting to learn.
>
>Here's the MSDN link that covers the core issue, which has some interesting points...
>http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=287515
>
>Note the workaround does not recommend against in-line aggregation concatenation; rather, it recommends against using expressions in an ORDER BY. This might be splitting hairs, but I would question the use of the word "undocumented" if Microsoft's own documentation states the following:
>
>In order to achieve the expected results from an aggregate concatenation query, apply any Transact-SQL function or expression to the columns in the SELECT list rather than in the ORDER BY clause.
>
>So I would state that so long as one doesn't use expressions in an ORDER BY, and deals with NULL values appropriately, I haven't seen anything that makes this less reliable than FOR XML.
>
>And I'm not saying that FOR XML is bad - I've used it, and so have many. It's just that the aggregation concatenation approach is a bit simpler.

I found a few threads myself one being http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/31804823-6e5e-4e2d-9729-330d12ccb880/dynamic-sql-stored-proc-with-informationschemacolumns where I used the "bad" solution for simplicity.

I just left a message for Erland in that thread.

The originating thread is this one http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/7b88ad77-e5ed-4888-82df-bd513c12cf02/on-string-aggregate-concatenation but I haven't re-read it yet.

I've just returned from the back to school night in my older son first freshman year in High School.