"There is a new FREE SKU for Visual Studio for open source developers and students called Visual Studio Community. It supports extensions and lots more all in one download. This is not Express. This is basically Pro."
Now I admit this is the early days of their open source push. That's fine. But until they make VS Pro free, across the board, I doubt non-MS shops will really pickup the platform. There isn't much of a win without VS. Heck, most MS devs are so VS centric that you'll probably get nothing but confused looks if you did use an alternative IDE and said that during an interview.
From the actual site for VS Community [0]:
> Q: Who can use Visual Studio Community? A: Here’s how individual developers can use Visual Studio Community: Any individual developer can use Visual Studio Community to create their own free or paid apps.
Sounds to me like you do fit in that category for this edition of VS. That being said, .NET development definitely does still seem very VS centric, but things seem to be changing. The experience of using sublime text + omnisharp[1] doesn't look too bad.
[0]: http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/visual-studio-com... [1]: http://www.omnisharp.net/