I had no problem developing real commercial applications.

You can also try SharpDevelop. It doesn't have all the abilities of VS, but it's open source.

I've been using NOD32 for over 3 years, but in the end I found out that it's not that good in catching all viruses. I got infected with 3 viruses, while updating NOD32 daily. All 3 viruses were caught by other anti-viruses (i.e. BitDefender).