Microsoft retro-compatibility, oh you!
Let me introduce my feelings on Visual Studio
Disclaimer: I only use C++ so most of the comments below are based upon that fact. Also, though I know that MSVS can compile using any compiler, I had to use the one provided with MSVS to comply with teachers needs.
TL;DR below
I have a love-hate relationship with Visual Studio, except without love. Every time I need to use it—because I never actually use it for fun—everything that might fail goes OK and everything that should have been OK fails for no good reason.
Let me explain that with just a few examples. All the examples below are real situations that happened to me and wasn't a problem while in another cross-platform IDE.
windows.h needs to be included before gl.h in order to use OpenGL;
math.h needs the _USE_MATH_DEFINES constant defined in order to use the math.h constants;
std::string comparison don't work with == and !=, the compare function must be used;
CTRL+A to select all the code and then CTRL+K+CTRL+F to format the code (with the cursor placed at the bottom of the file) can't be called a keyboard shortcut;
I got tricked once in the past with the virtual directories not really holding the files in the project directory and I shipped a program for an exam without the source code. You can argue that this one was kind of my fault.
That is just a few examples that I can remember. Another thing I don't like when using Visual Studio is that even if I'm working on a one file project, it will create a dozen useless files that weights about 150 MB. Again, I guess that this is an option that I don't know of and it probably can be turned off.
My latest misadventure with visual studio and its retro-compatibility
I should have wrote: "My latest misadventure with Microsoft and its nonexistent retro-compatibility" because my little misadventure is a misadventure totally because of that. Well, that makes a lot of "misadventure" in the same sentence. So let's begin.
Prologue
I formatted my laptop (on vista) one or two years ago and installed Visual Studio 2010 only to be able to hand out assignments to teachers. None of them use another IDE, they all use Visual Studio which is provided by the university. I normally use Eclipse CDT for C++ projects and convert them to Visual Studio project if needed.
Last Chapter - The Microsoft dictatorship
All was fine (well, except the situations listed above) until today when I tried to open the visual studio project examples provided by the teacher and find out that those are MSVS 2012 projects and are incompatible with MSVS 2010. I was resisting the change to MSVS 2012 for quite a moment for compatibility reasons but today I was forced to download it. After about 20 or 30 minutes (I have quite a good internet connection), I tried to open the installer only to find out that it was incompatible with my version of Windows. That's it, I'm done with you Microsoft!
TL;DR - Too long - Didn't read
I have Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft is telling me to pay for Visual Studio 2012 only to make me pay for Windows 7 or 8.
That was still too long
Microsoft wants money no matter what!