It's not true at all that you have to pay for VC++, you can get the Express version for free and it's completely usable for a variety of stuff, I wrote my own compiler for my own language and also processor architecture emulator with VC++ Express. It's awesome tool, it's free and it makes development MUCH easier, I have yet to see a tool that would top its debugging capabilities.
Please don't feed people misinformation, Express is fully functional and usable for almost anything you can think of, paid versions offer more professionalism and comfort especially when working in teams and such, but you don't really need them to develop.
For me, Visual Studio is best IDE there is and I have tried and also use (not as primary though) many others and I have developed a lot of things in it: Compilers for my programming languages, emulators of my experimental processors, MusicString compiler and synthesis library + GUI, a game engine, games, a few commercial projects (for a client) and more.
It's a great tool and if you're going to bash it, then provide reasons why is it bad. Hating just because it's Microsoft and because it's so cool to bash anything Microsoft made is childish.
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