I'm a little confused about the excitement behind varchar(max). In the article it states, "TEXT is hard to work with in programming environments." Now maybe it's just the environment I've been programming in for the past several years (Visual Studio .NET, mostly C#), but I haven't found text (or ntext) to be hard at all. Through ADO.NET I can SELECT, INSERT, and UPDATE text/ntext columns just like any other column.

What am I missing?