I don't actually care that much about compilers - as others have mentioned, there are several options out there. I also am not particularly concerned about upd

I don't actually care that much about compilers - as others have mentioned, there are several options out there. I also am not particularly concerned about updated C++ feature support - the reality is that there are still a ton of really terrible windows developers out there who aren't familiar with the windows application model, security models, best practices, and have no idea how servicing works. When people start complaining about not having functors, or some other language feature, I tend to get a little irritated, because this is not the big problem with software development on Windows. If someone doesn't want to use VS2008 Express, I will note that there is always WDK, which last I checked shipped with cl.exe, and will almost certainly continue to do so.