I did know about the express versions, but in 2010 I do not want to track feature matrices for dev tools (http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products). Some things like test driven development and source version control are not enterprise features anymore imo, theyre required. My earlier post was not clear about this, sorry about that.

Developing software today typically requires downloading a framework or two, checkout out code from github, code.google.com etc. Often to start developing using a particular framework foo on ubuntu requires just "apt-get install foo", on windows it still involves 1990s style chasing of dependencies.

In retrospect all the features that I ask for matter mostly to developers so there is definitely a bias in what I am saying.

Moreover, even the grown-up VS is free for many students (and cheap for the rest), and with BizSpark they have a discount for startups too. I don't think dev tools are Microsoft's problem right now.