For those of you out there venturing into the developers world, congradulations.....your life is over



J/K.
Microsoft has an awesome tool called MSDN Subscriptions which allows you total access to all of MS programs without the need to pay any extra fees for licensing, activation or even entering serial numbers.
This really helps because you have access to Visual Studio .NET (and all older versions if you need them), all MS Operating Systems, All MS Office Suites, All MS Backoffice applications. Everything you need to get develop an application, test it and distribute it.
For those of you that work in an IT department, the license covers ALL employess (as long as it is for development)
If you want to purchase your own MSDN you can, its about $1000 - 2000. But You wind up saving allot of money because of the amount of software that you recieve.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions/