Working with large data in SQL Server 2005 and beyond

Recently I ran across a data centric application that had been written for SQL Server 2005. This particular application had a need to store a lot of large text based data. On the data tier this had been implemented using the text and ntext data types. Given this was a new application that had never looked at an earlier version of SQL Server I was surprised to find that the developers hadn't taken advantage of the new approach to large data types, namely the MAX length specifier for the varchar and nvarchar data types, e.g. using VARCHAR(MAX) to work with up to 2GB of data.

There are a number of advantages to working with the new types over the old. There is support for most, if not all, string functions and they can also be used when declaring variables.

I wonder if these new large data types are yet to become widely known by developers, or if it is simply a case of us all being comfortable with known ways of meeting a particular requirement and following familiar patterns.