VC++ was pretty good. I have good memories with VC++ 6. At that time borland was mostly following MS - or as I thought. I liked MS approach much better than anything else in the market.

Desktop computing era is over now :(

The VC6 IDE was nice as a code editor and debugger and the compiler was a bit better than C++ Builder's, but that is only as far as it goes. When it came to making desktop GUI applications C++ Builder was lightyears ahead of VC6. In fact it still is, it is much easier to make a desktop GUI application[0] in the very first version of C++ Builder than it is on the very latest version of Visual C++.

The VCL framework combined with the visual editor in C++ Builder[1] are way more advanced than anything Microsoft has made available for (regular[2]) C++ developers targeting the windows desktop.

[0] as long as you don't care about the fact it'll use some old versions of GUI controls, though a manifest resource can fix that

[1] and Delphi, where it really came from

[2] i do not count using Managed C++ or whatever .NET based, those are different beasts