SQL Client Aliases - Follow-up

Well, after much debate, we've decided to ditch SQL Client Aliases and go with DNS CName records instead. This will mean assigning separate IP addresses to each instance on our multi-instance servers and changing every non-standard port in the enterprise back to 1433, but we feel it's ultimately worth the effort. We're even going as far as setting up a separate DNS zone for our SQL Servers and adding that as a DNS search suffix enterprise-wide such that we DBAs can manage the CNames ourselves rather than relying on the 24-hour SLA of the infrastructure team to get anything done for us :) That said, I'm still kind proud of the Client Alias solution I developed, so I'll still be polishing it up and posting it here, though likely not for a few weeks as I'm taking a couple of weeks off to recharge.