So you want to play with writing code for Windows?
Maybe I've been living in a hole for the past six months, but I just found an announcement on the Microsoft Developer Network site: the Visual Studio Express Editions are free - forever!
That's great news if you are looking for a low-cost development environment for Windows. For many of us, the Express Editions are probably all we need. The only major drawback is the lack of a full MSDN Library. Had I known this before I probably would have gotten these instead of a Visual Studio Standard Edition license.