I seem to remember MS "Programmer's Workbench" for C/C++ 6 on DOS in the early 90s. It was a PITA, and I far and away preferred the Borland tool stack.

The one thing the MS C compiler seemed good at was compiling gigantic "translitered" functions (generated by a code translator of the company where I was working at the time). Otherwise, meh.

Turbo Pascal for Windows was simply awesome, (unfairly) compared to the C SDK for Windows 3.X, as well. The windowing library (objects), and the way it linked methods as event callbacks were much easier to read and write than hand-crufted event loops/switches in C. MS eventually made something comparable in C++, but I was long gone to *nix land by the time that mattered.

What I meant was Microsoft's bloated and unwieldy C compiler, I don't recall if it had achieved the moniker 'visual' by DOS 4 or if that waited until Win95 release. It came in a green box on at least 4 floppies and was a PITA to use. Turbo Pascal, compared to that, made me wonder why Microsoft didn't adopt it as their 'main' implementation tool.

Maybe he meant QuickC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickC)