I personally think MS make great developer tools. I find it very difficult to use any IDE other than Visual Studio – possibly because I’ve used it for years. But they do need to do something about the costs, what exactly I’m not sure – maybe they could give the standard edition away for free instead of just the Express one – after all they’re giving away their Robotics Studio for free now.
And how well is Windows Phone 7 (I thought they’d shortened the name to just "Windows Phone"?) going to do I wonder?