I've been playing with Team Foundation Server, Whidbey (Visual Studio 2005), and Yukon (SQL Server 2005) since early in the beta cycles. All three of them are remarkable products, with enormous advances over their predecessors (in the case of TFS, I'm spuriously considering Visual SourceSafe the predecessor, although TFS is a elephant compared to the mouse of VSS), and all of them should be critical components for anyone developing in the Microsoft camp.

All three of them also happen to be a little unpolished, with odd little quirks and errata, hilariously incomplete documentation, and a tendency towards resource hoggishness.

One thing I've found remarkable, however, given that the three of them have been in final form for anywhere from two months to over half a year, is how little real information and first-hand accounts are available online. I'm continually hitting roadblocks where there are marginal functions or incomplete documentation, and it's surprizing to find zero references to the same problems or questions on any of the normal forums (e.g. Google Groups, online searches, etc). Among the development community, outside of the desperate-to-get-anointed-free-support-MVP crowd, they just don't have the aura of excitement they probably deserve.

Given that there are literally millions of developers and technology hobbyists out there, it's usually the case that any problems one faces are well trodden, and a quick search on the newsgroup usually yields exactly the answer one needs, so this dearth of time-travel support really is disconcerting.

The only conclusion I can draw is that there simply aren't that many developers seriously using these technologies. Visual Studio 2005 is of course seeing some use, but there are still huge armies of developers sticking with 2003 (given the break between .NET 1.1 and 2.0). A lot of SQL shops are still taking a wait-and-see approach with 2005. Team Foundation Server, primarily because of the cost of the Team editions, and the cost of a TFS Server license if you grow past a 5-user team, seems to be fairly rare.