Imagine you have an effect plugin. That effect has a module with an on/off switch. That switch is in the off position by default.
 
You enable write automation on the track, play the project, and exactly at measure 3, you flip the switch to "on". Then you stop playback. How would you expect the automation to be recorded?
 
(a) Off before measure 3, On after measure 3
or 
(b) On before and after measure 3.
 
If you said (a) and you work for Cakewalk, please have a look at CWBRN-20146, where reproducible behavior in (b) for Console Emulator and VX-64 modules was marked "as intended". :-)

Imagine you have a question, but no one understands it.
Sorry, can you clarify what you're asking here, or is this just meant for Cakewalk tech support ?
It seems like you've discovered a reproducible bug relating to automation and "Console Emulator and VX-64 modules" . . . please clarify the question, what are you trying to do ?

The gist is this... when you record automation for a switch, rather than a knob, what should get recorded: the position of the switch before and after you toggled it, or only the position after (the position of the switch before gets lost).

I guess it depends if the plugins are programmed to respond to switch activity, or not.
You've tested it, and it doesn't work as expected ?
Does the user manual say that it should work for a switch, for Console emulator or VX-64 ?

I'm pretty sure it would not have occurred to me to wait around writing null automation data up to the switch point in real time, and then try to hit the switch right at 3:01:000. I would have just inserted the envelope with the module turned off so the envelope starts with a node at 0, and then gone out and inserted a jump to 100 at the On point. So I never would have encountered this bug.

Hi Yev,
You are using touch mode right? In touch mode automation is written only when you TOUCH the parameter. So if there was no automation present prior to the touch point you get a single event that turns the switch on.
Since automation latches via a "dotted line" to the prior/next event, in this case since there is no prior event SONAR starts out assuming that the switch is ON since there is only a single event where you touched the parameter. As such I can see why this happens. Perhaps the behavior should be changed to add an extra node at the original value at the exact location of the touch and jump to the new value there. That would resolve this issue.
 
I think in your case if you used overwrite mode, you would get the result you wanted.
Edit: a better way is to create the envelope first and then use touch mode. The envelope is created at the current value so when you touch the button you will get a jump from the last value to the new value properly.

Maybe the envelope should be created when the user first TOUCHes the parameter. Putting an extra node at the location of the first inserted node will cause a jump at that location after a user has added nodes before the first inserted node. For some parameters this could cause a noise.

In other words, you're interpreting the non-existence of an envelope to mean the original state of the plugin is irrelevant. To a user, that may well be data loss. If the user just wanted to change the plugin from "off" to "on" for the whole track, he wouldn't need automation. If he's automating a single flip of a switch, he must have something else in mind.

I keep having this fantasy about non-continuous automation whereby the automation for multiple parameters in multiple plugins can all be expressed in one automation lane. I don't know how feasible this would be development wise.

Let's say you have a delay or EQ plugin and you want to automate different states of those plugins on the same track, or simply turn them on and off at different times. Currently, you could end up with a whole bunch of automation lanes for each parameter just to do this, and it's a waste of space (as well as hard to keep track of). Perhaps a better way of working would be to have one automation lane which could handle multiple automation "events" involving multiple plugins and parameters on a track. I can just see it now - once you insert an event node at a particular time, the node could be opened to reveal a dialog into which you can insert parameter changes into a list. So for example for an EQ, an automation event could include:
Low Mid Freq: 400Hz
Low Mid Gain: -3dB
Low Mid Q: 12.0
Etc.
Or maybe you'd like to have multiple EQ's set up and turn then on and off at different parts of the song.

You could have one single lane for each plugin, or a separate lane for each. The importance being that each lane can manage multiple parameters.

Of course this is just my fantasy - I'm not a programmer so I can just go crazy with my imagination without having to worry about how hard it would be to implement :)

Maybe for Sonar X6?