At the risk of having this degrade in to yet another flamewar, I have to agree with mr_ripley on the Microsoft thing. Rands hinted at their, as far as I can tell, standard tactic before the turn of the millenium: release cheap, accessible but shitty software, and slowly improve it as time goes on and the market demands. Now that it's 2004, I'm seeing products which I'm finding it hard to find serious fault against. MSVC, from what I've seen (but mainly heard), is the current IDE of choice for win32 application development.

In the interests of honesty, however, I'm a Linux developer with semi-popular code "out in the field", as it were, so it's a bit hypocritical for me to be talking about MS development tools. This could be, perhaps, because I'm essentially a "hobbyist" developer: I'm no longer working towards a timeframe, and I've become so comfortable with a particular environment (4 xterms) that the effort required to actually learn a new environment exceeds any long-term gain I would receive from it.

Rands: three years ago I would have said "Macromedia's Coldfusion", although I'm not sure how true that is now. It didn't handle the creation of databases, though, merely the presentation and business logic.