I did some basic C/C++ development back in the Windows 2000/XP era. I never needed to pay for a Visual Studio license, I didn't even use Visual Studio. I was ha

I did some basic C/C++ development back in the Windows 2000/XP era. I never needed to pay for a Visual Studio license, I didn't even use Visual Studio. I was hacking things together in notepad and gcc at the time. I did years of development work against Windows machines before I got my first paid Visual Studio license, and it was still like a couple years until the first time I bothered actually installing the Windows SDK.