Fortunately programmers seem much less susceptible to Microsoft's
"Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" tactics than consumers are.
And every now and then, MS suddenly deprecates a technology, leaving their loyal followers behind (e.g. Silverlight)
However, in the real world, people often (for compatibility reasons or just because they like the nice development environment) need to use MSVC. As I've said, mix 'n match is not an easy option. It's not a bad compiler, just not really a C compiler anymore.
