I attended my second meeting on 03/12/08.  The guest speaker for this meeting was Miguel Castro and the topic was extensibility designs and patterns.  This was over my head in ways but I was able to grasp the overall concept and can see the benefit of creating your own providers, modules, plug-ins, etc. (time well spent).

Instead of connecting to a specific text file to get data you connect to the source that contains the file to retrieve the data.  This gives you the ability to easily point you module to different data sources when changes are needed instead of modifying the application.  Efficient!

The initial setup may be time consuming but sounds like it's well work it. For more information on this topic please visit Miguel's site.  For those in the Cincinnati area interested in .NET programming can visit CINNUG for meeting dates and times.