In response to a post Greg Robinson about cancelling his MSDN subscriptions due to excessive focus on unreleased technologies by Robert Scoble writes

 MSDN, by the way, is like a PDC. It focuses on newer stuff and is produced by Microsoft. The other magazines are not tasked with covering the new stuff as much.

This assumption is wrong on so many levels I don't know where to start. It is telling that MSDN has strayed from being where developers get up to speed on existing Microsoft technologies to being a primarily a monger of vaporware. If MSDN is to be likened to a conference it should be TechEd (focus on existing technologies and best practices with a smattering of sneak peaks at the future) not PDC (focus on technology that won't be released for 2 to 4 years or that may not make it past the chopping block).  I've pinged various content strategists at MSDN and Sara Williams about this in the past with the responses being that most of the content is still about existing technologies.

I suspect that what people resent is the fact that the releases are so far off (Whidbey is 1 year away, Longhorn is 2 years away) and there aren't any publiclly generally available releases that are easy to get into which makes the frustration at articles about MSBuild, Avalon, Indigo, etc more difficult to stomach. It's one thing to see articles about beta technology you can download easily off the 'net and another to see articles about technology that is still in alpha which isn't publiclly available.  I don't intend for the MSDN XML Developer Center to go this route and so far have tended to focus the content appearing on the site about working with existing technologies.