Visual Studio.NET Pricing: over one thousand dollars for the Professional edition and two-and-a-half thousand dollars for the Enterprise Architect edition. (The .NET SDK, which has C++, C#, VB and JScript compilers plus online help, a debugger and a profiler is, of course, free.) I don’t mind the high-end pricing, most corporations will buy into it. What disturbs me is that developers and ‘hobbyists’ (msft term, that) who like to program at home, in their spare time, are getting locked out of the GUI game because of this ridiculous pricing scheme. That’s a shame, because availability of good tools was always a plus point for Microsoft. This is a serious opportunity for things like Borland JBuilder Personal Edition and KDevelop to build up some mindshare.

The standard editions (Visual C#, Visual Basic, et al) are pretty affordable, though, at $109 apiece. Haven’t used them, though — so can’t say how good they are, though I suspect they’ll let you create forms-based apps with minimum fuss.