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.