There are free (Express) versions of Visual Studio but they lack those awesome Visual Studio Professional features AND Visual Studio Professional costs 1500 bucks.

My experience: they're free, but they cost a piece of your sanity. [0]

I wanted to set up Visual Studio Express on my Windows partition just so I could screw around with Silverlight. Two hours, about 12 forum threads, and three beers later, I vowed to never develop anything for Microsoft.

[0] http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010-ed...

The SDKs are free, and ship with compilers. The Express GUI development environments are free, but limited.