Well, golly. Now that Rob has fixed the /Zi bug, Visual C++ 2005 seems to be building small apps pretty well. There are three or so gotchas to be aware of: 1) apps like gyp's unit test won't be able to build until you've run the IDE once so it can register itself 2) you have to install winbind or /Zi will still be broken 3) the first run of a devenv /Zi build will hang after starting the pdb service; you have to kill it to recovert. Further runs (until reboot) will work fine.
See http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21259 for a nice script to demonstrate the latter problem.
Oh, and you can't create projects; our ie implementation isn't good enough to run the wizard yet. But you can use projects that were created earlier.