I posted briefly about this idea recently, when I mentioned Joshua Flanagan's excellent regex wrapper. I didn't appreciate it as an overall concept then though, the idea of writing a quick wrapper around something to improve your overall code. Jon Galloway talks a little about this idea in his post "a simple example of a fluent interface", and also links to some more fluent interface examples on Martin Fowler's website. Ayende's recent work with Active Record and nHibernate 1.2 are good examples of this idea as well.