For Windows programming, you can't beat Visual Studio. I use the Visual Studio IDE for Amiga programming as well.
Agreed. VS is a great product. If you're a student you can get full VS for free through dreamspark. Else you can get Express which is pretty full featured anyway.
The obvious disadvantage of VS is the lack of plugins for addtional languages. (Maybe there are some out there? I only use C++ and C#).
OT RE: FlexLM/FlexNet. Macrovision no longer owns it, it is now owned by Acresso (owners of InstallShield). And, it's never had to be a single point of failure. No reason you can't have multiple license servers.
