Frances,
At this stage, using Visual Studio or Borland will not make a difference for you. For none of us.
We are using just a C compiler as Enrico very well said
But if we are able to complete the project that Sarabjeet has been working on to help us, then things may change drastically
Also, for what I have heard (I have not tested it yet myself) the Visual Studio built in resources editor is finally available!!! It was removed in Visual Studio Express (a quite stupid desition) but now is back in the right place. We need to confirm this. So for now you have a source code editor and a resources editor, both free, in the same tool from Microsoft.
And if we finally are able to complete The harbour language extension, then we will live a real revolution
Anyhow I recently posted the link to a video that Sarabjeet built for us and sadly I saw no comments at all about it, or maybe I missed them.