.Net Data Access
If you are going to be using SQL Server, you are probably using it with Microsoft .net development tools. The data access components in .Net grew up from their VB roots and are powerfull, flexible and easy to use. Unfortunatly, like most other things, they can be abused as well.

Fortunatly, Microsoft and it's community have developed some seriously idiot proof tools. The Microsoft Data Access Application Block and the Enterprise Library make calling stored procedures as easy as pie. If you are writting data access routines in C# or Visual Basic and are not using these then you should really have a good look. I see to many people creating data adaptors, commands and connections in code when they are all wrapped up in these libraries. They can be found at Application Blocks.

The other tool of note is the built in dataset designer in Visual Studio. By simply dragging tables from there server explorer to a dataset it creates a nice, type-safe dataset including table adaptors. Table adaptors as generated by Visual Studio are great although they are much more geared to Client-Server 2-tier development and not proper 3-tier or web development. Having said that they can still be used for this and are quite neat.