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What I'm more intersted in right now is this: they have an *excellent* development environment (Visual Studio) and have had it for years. But, as far as I know, ... I really couldn't use it to develop applications in any of the languages listed

A couple of years ago, I saw a demo of Visual Studio for Haskell, based on links to a running Hugs interpreter. Daan Leijen was the author, and I believe he later spent some time at Microsoft in Redmond, specifically working with the Visual Studio programming team. However, I suspect that VS for Haskell was more of a side interest and not a real product for release. Daan, would you like to comment further?

Well Daan is very, very, very busy, so I'll anser in his place. Visual Haskell, as Daan calls it, was (is) rather well suited as a real product for release, but licensing problems keep him from distributing it. Rijk-Jan van Haaften Utrecht University