Lack of Good Articles? I don't think so.

I just ran across this very well stated newsgroup posting (to microsoft.public.dotnet.general):

"I would like to share my disappointment of Microsoft with you readers. Be
aware that I'm in no way a Microsoft "basher" and that, in fact, I use their
programming technologies everyday. More importantly, I find these
technologies quite useful and, most of the time, very well done.

But I'm currently quite fed up with what Microsoft is doing with the next
generation of the .NET Framework. It has absolutely nothing to do with the
functionalities, far from that! It seems like a terrific new product. The
.NET runtime environnement really impressed me from the start and it will
continue to. But the problem here is that MSDN, and all the ressources at
Microsoft, seems to focus on a product that is not out yet.

On MSDN, the majority of articles seems to be "how to do that on Whidbey",
"How Whidbey is great for that", "How life is wonderful with Whidbey", and
bla bla bla. But hey guys, the majority of your readers can't even test the
little example you put in your great articles about Whidbey! Why should I
care? Out there we only have the .NET Framework 1.1 to work with. There's
not even a beta version of whidbey that I can use to experiment with this
great new environnement! Why focus on a product that is not out yet and,
from certains informations, will not even be in the current year!

I was a very "patriotic" reader of MSDN for the great number of quality
article that it propose. But now, I just go there from time to time to
realize, each time, that they talks about something I can't use and will not
be able to use for the next year or so. Imagine a computer hardware magazine
that do mainly reviews of product that readers will never be able to use
before one or two years? I want programming information that is useful for
me now, not hypothetically in the future..."

After reading this, I actually agreed with the poster. Although, I do have to say I do have access to the March bits of Whidbey, so I can test those examples. However, like the poster said, the majority of people cannot currently test that information. My only rebuttle to the poster is that the information is very good and right on, and when the Beta is finally released (sometime this summer), you'll have an abundance of reference articles that you can go by, and will not be having to wait around like most of us right now to get some good examples and explanations of things.