[aguynamedrich]

That's not always the case. I have grown overwhelmingly comfortable writing all my utilities and demos in Visual Studio, but I no longer work for a Microsoft shop, which is where I've always gotten my VS licenses. On any new computer I purchase for myself or at a non MS-centric job, I rely on Visual Studio Express, and this news really sucks for me.

[marshray]

For years I did all my hobby development with the SDK command line C++ compiler. But I do that on Linux now anyway. Every time I think about making some of it portable to MSVC again MS pulls something like this to remind me why I left.