I have tried C++ Builder 2009 and Visual Studio 2008. VCL seems much more friendlier than MFC. Are there alternates which are superior than these two?
PS: Please do not suggest freebies or open source IDEs. I really am interested in commercial IDE's only.
It all depends what you are coding. If you are doing only Win32, I believe that Visual Studio 2008 is really polished for Win32. You can always try Visual Studio as an Express Edition to try out.
Visual Studio 2008 hands down. There are standalone (but mostly open source, heh) UI designers that will do code generation for a variety of libraries that I consider better than both MFC and VCL.
Visual Studio is the best C++ development environment, but MFC is a pretty terrible framework. I'd recommend just writing native win32 (longer start-up time since you have to write all the boilerplate, but easier to maintain and debug long-term), using C# and the .net framework, or perhaps using VCL of which I know nothing.
I suppose mentioning VCL and MFC means you are referring to Windows IDEs only. With that said, I think VS2008 pretty much has the crown no contest. Its debugger is one of the best you can get and it's perfectly integrated into the IDE. Don't get me wrong, C++ builder is still a great piece of software, but I feel Borland's line of coding tools was in it's prime in the days before they sold it to Embarcadero. Visual Studio 2010 also looks pretty promising!
I'm not sure I understand the connection between VCL and MFC and an IDE.
An IDE is like a document editor. I think Visual Studio is great, and I haven't seen Builder in a long time, it might be good too. I am also a fan of Eclipse and think the CDT made great strides.
However, VCL and MFC are just class libraries that are distributed with the IDE but can be used without it. If you want to ask about that, edit your question.
Visual Studio is the C++ IDE for Windows. Note that you don't have to use MFC at all - for instance I use WTL, and other GUI libraries and frameworks, such as Qt can also be used from VS.
+1 for Visual Studio 2008.
Combine VS with Visual Assist for better code completion, refactoring, better overview, ... (really couldn't live without it anymore)
Combine VS with ViEmu for vi style editing in Visual Studio (still getting used to it, but certainly more fun)
The only commercial alternative I know of is Qt Creator, and that is still in beta. I don't know it so I can't consider it for the comparison.
Apart from that, the choice is obvious: if you want to do portable C++ or C++/CLI, take Visual Studio 2008; the debugger is amazing, and the compiler is highly standards-compliant. But for rich-client Windows applications, Windows database apps, COM servers and clients or Delphi interop, take C++Builder. There's nothing as productive as VCL when it comes to rich client UI.