The biggest problem is that they apparently will no longer provide free compilers. That will make continuous integration windows backends even harder to deal with than they currently are, and basically unavailable to most open source projects.
Really? I'm pretty sure csc.exe (the C# compiler) ships with the .NET client re-distributable, for free. On any box that has any kind of .NET installed I can fire up notepad and a command prompt and compile something. Are you confusing IDE with compiler? Or talking about only the C++ compiler? There are also a plethora of free IDEs Qt Creator, SharpDevelop, Monodevelop et.al. I don't see what the big deal is.
The article mentions that the Windows 8 SDK will no longer ship with a compiler tool chain. So, it's not just the IDE - the compilers are also gone - you could still use older compilers, just like you could use older versions of Visual Studio.
We're not talking about C#, we're talking about native code C++ development with the Win32 API. What most commercial Windows apps are still written in and what Microsoft used to call "Windows Platform SDK" or just "the Windows SDK".
