Check this out, you can get Visual Studio 2005 Express free, if you download it before Nov 7th 2006. However, from the comments below the story, it seems that some parts are free forever, and some are not.
Sounds like a good time to have a look at what they’re (MS) doing. But then again, with the wealth of Open Source stuff around, and with our own bright (heh heh) ideas, they’d have to be giving me a pretty awesome product that delivered a LOT of stuff that I couldn’t do somehow else for me to change to it.
Then again, who am I compared with the legions that do use MS stuff. I’m me, we’re Dev Dawn, and that’s that.