Consider the bizspark program for msdn licenses. I agree that MSVC is an awesome IDE and debugger, except for creation 2002 which was terrible. The more tools y

Consider the bizspark program for msdn licenses. I agree that MSVC is an awesome IDE and debugger, except for creation 2002 which was terrible. The more tools you know well, the wider are your options for each problem you want to solve. Vim, make, and C++ is a fine choice for many things. PHP and MySQL for others. C# and winforms and sql server where that model fits. If you stay only with MS, you will build more experience in that area, at the expense of becoming narrower. Only you can make this choice for you.