What could better than Visual Studio?

How about FREE COPIES of the following tools:
*Visual Basic 2005 Express
*Visual C# 2005 express edition
*Visual Web Developer 2005 Expres edition
*SQL Server 2005 Express edition

All available @ http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/

At that price, who needs to settle for inferior "free" software? Get the real deal today!

>>3 even for $40 it's not bad, if you look at it from a casual/n00b point of view. If you're a n00b which would you rather deal with; paying $40 for visual basic or trying to set up cygwin and then learning python and then getting disgusted and saying 'fuck it' because your makefiles and programs don't work because, unbeknownst to you whitespace (tabs, space) is part of the laguage used by both make and python.

For the hobbiest programmer, VS/VB is superior.