A few points:
You can get VS.NET (Professional) for under £400.00 per seat if your company or the company you work for is a software house.
VS.NET does need the .NET framework installed to run, but the C++ applications you make don't have to use the framework.
VS.NET professional comes on 5 CD's (including the framework), Enterprise comes on 7 CD's.
Neither VC++6 or VC++.NET need runtimes unless you use MFC, ANSI-C libraries or the Framework, which means that you don't need to install runtimes if you are just using the API and STL.
VC++.NET over VC++6
Better standards compliance - lots of freely available code libraries won't work without massive changes and workarounds on 6.
Faster running programs (5 years of improvements in the optimiser).
VC++6 over VC++.NET
Cost! You may be able to find VS6 cheap from somewhere.
I currently have 3 C++ compilers installed on my laptop:
1) VS.NET of course, for windows programming.
2) Cygwin/GCC for a unix-like development environment (the company I work for mainly targets unix systems).
3) Digital Mars - you've probably never heard of this one, but it's a VC++ compatible compiler that seems to be moving forward towards standards compliance faster than VC++ is - unfortunately the editor is pants
, but it does produce smaller exe's than VC++ and can compile to 16 bit code too.
As you can probably tell, I believe that standards compliance is important. There's nothing I hate more than writing the same piece of code over for another OS ... and maintenance of it is worse!
