FWIW they provide an almost completely functional Visual Studio Express edition for free (that is a relatively new thing) and have even started including things

FWIW they provide an almost completely functional Visual Studio Express edition for free (that is a relatively new thing) and have even started including things like JQuery. It's a pretty slow process but I think they have always listened to their devs. Incidentally, I do think it's the best IDE out there but I'm not a MS fanboi, and have spent plenty of time in other IDEs and even vi :-)