How do you think these professional Windows developers got into it before they turned pro? Hint: most of them didn't learn it in college.

Now they get into it before turning pro by writing Metro apps. Which is what MS wants, right? More metro apps?

No, more often than not they'll grow up writing Linux, iOS, Mac, and Android tablet apps. I've never actually even seen a WP7 device or a Metro app. Even shrinkwrapped apps coded entirely in dotnet are relatively rare. Even once Windows 8 starts shipping it will many years before Windows developers can ignore the billion-or-so computers still running Windows 7, Server 2k8, and below.

Compatibility with the native Win32 app ecosystem is the primary source of Windows' monopoly on desktop computing. Microsoft products rarely succeed outside of that (like any other company). For them to actively try to kill that off is truly insane IMHO.

Downloaded VB6 for free from Kazaa?

Not me of course...

I actually remember trying to decide between eclipse and VB6. What whim made me end up choosing the latter now completely escapes me. I think it was because it didn't have those weird {} braces. Ah, C#, the irony.

Why any platform vendor would charge money for even the most powerful possible development tools is completely beyond me. All I can figure is that it makes sense to non-hackers who aren't competent to run a technology company.

Note you could buy a copy of VB for about $100. Which wasn't a bad deal considering it came with a thousand pages of manuals & tutorials.

At the time I was a hobbyist straight out of uni where £100 was rather a lot of money (yeah, they always convert dollars to pounds over here, greedy buggers). And I didn't need a manual as I picked up a 'learn VB6 in 30 days book'. Classic.

The trouble with all these 'cheap cause you use it all the time' tools is that to start with you don't want to use them all the time. So they're relatively very expensive.

For example I was just re-learning programming to prove a point to my boss that the internal IT program sucked.

Students can always use https://www.dreamspark.com/ .

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.

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.