Please consider that with each variation on each axis a possibly exponentially bigger space is spanned that has to be tested. I have no problem with them only supporting a year old version of the DirectX SDK and currently focussing on the free versions of Visual Studio.
Please also consider that they have several versions of their own software (as far as I understand it) namely Basic, C# and C++ and a free version of it and a paid-for professional version.
Supposing they would support two versions of DirectX and two versions of Visual Studio (per language) they would have to test and support 6*2*2 is 24 combinations. That would be quite a waste of time. Especially considering that they have to support 6 of their own verions. Perhaps it would be a good idea to stop doing that?
I don't want to start a language war because I like a lot of languages (PHP is currently my favorite) but perhaps that for game development C/C++ is the best choice because it is being compiled and therefore standalone and very fast.
BTW. Two of the first games I compiled turned out to have 2 Mbyte .exe's. With a smart linker that wouldn't be necessary for a source code file of only 40 lines...
With PHP your source code file just stays 40 lines and the rest is done by the interpreter (which is very smart and has an inbuild cache for scripts that are used more than others. Of course all scripts are bytecoded the first time around and that bytecode is cached.
Well, I don't think that PHP or Javascript would be perfect, but I predict that they can't keep supporting their old love Basic and that their new love C# may also turn out not to be the best language for game development.
BTW. For the C-lovers: C++ is just an extension of C.
You can keep programming in it as you did in C.
And PHP and Javascript are also C-based, but in PHP you have to put a '$' before each variable name because the 'designer' was inspired by macro languages like shell and Perl.
Bah!
