Okay, "free" was poor phrasing. I should have said "no extra charge". Compare this to the situation described in the original article, where the developer had to buy a separate $59 certificate from a third party, on top of what Microsoft charges you for Visual Studio (which looks to be $499 for the cheapest non-evaluation version).
Express isn't an evaluation version. Also, it's trivially easy to get setup with BizSpark if you're a small startup and get free copies of Visual Studio.
No mobile apps, no conventional desktop apps, no command line apps... looks pretty "evaluaty" to me. Also: "private developers will have to pay $49 a year, corporations $99 a year."
So, on the one hand we have (from Apple):
Xcode (free or $5.00, depending on what kind of mood Apple is in that week)
Developer program with store access: $99/year
Code-sigining certificate: included.
From Microsoft we have:
Non-crippled Visual Studio: $499
Developer program with store access: $49-$99/year
Code-signing certificates: must be purchased separately from a third party.
Sorry, but Microsoft backpedaled after the bad press. You can download Windows 8 development tools for free now. [1]
Your info about "no command line apps" is also outdated. It USED to be true, but I have VS2010 Express, and it came with the command line tools:
c:\Devel\Msdev.2010\Common7\Tools>vsvars32
vsvars32
Setting environment for using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 x86 tools.
c:\Devel\Msdev.2010\Common7\Tools>cl
cl
Microsoft (R) 32-bit C/C++ Optimizing Compiler Version 16.00.40219.01 for 80x86
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
usage: cl [ option... ] filename... [ /link linkoption... ]
c:\Devel\Msdev.2010\Common7\Tools>
I also use XCode, and it's ... not nearly as good as Visual Studio, though I am liking the new Eclipse-like "compile your code as you're typing it" real time error markup. A friend tells me that XCode can be configured to be sane, but I haven't given it a try yet.
