Hello,
When I first started developing I was introduced to the self-encapsulating class that knew way too much about itself and the world around it. Since I work primarily on web applications which is a mostly a state-free environment, it didn’t make a lot of sense to continue to build those kinds of classes.
I eventually caught on to CodeSmith and began customizing templates to generate a entity/collection/manager class set for each database object. This method has saved a lot of time and make my code more agile. If you are interested, you can download the templates I use from my site.