Well, I hate spending the money, but I guess I have to stay in the loop. I ordered an MSDN Enterprise subscription today from Amazon for about $1,400. Buying either that or the Universal before the end of the month gets you upgraded to the forthcoming Visual Studio Team Edition with MSDN plan, which will retail for around $5,000. So to get all of the latest and greatest stuff (including Office, Windows Vista, Source Safe, and the server products), it makes sense.
The alternative was waiting for the release of Visual Studio and getting the pro version for $800 or so, but it lacks all of the testing tools (not to mention practically all of the software Microsoft makes).
Like I said, I do hate spending the money, but using VS 2005 in beta form the last year and a half, it really is an amazing tool that I use every day. Getting to know the testing stuff in particular (the release version, that is) is important from a career standpoint too, because I suspect it will be used everywhere. I have to remind myself that the first time I bought a subscription, back in 2001, I spent $2,500 and was unemployed in a scary way. This is a piece of cake by comparison!
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