If you are a student you can get a free Visual Studio 2010 Professional edition absolutely for Free. For this you need to be a Microsoft DreamSpark member (that is also free), and you can get Many other cool applications from Microsoft for free like
1. Free Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional Edition
2. Free Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard
3. Free Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition
4. Free Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition
5. Free Microsoft SQL server 2005 developer Edition
6. Free Microsoft Expression studio
7. Free Microsoft Windows server 2003.
8. Free Microsoft Windows server 2008 Standard
9. Free Microsoft Virtual PC
10. Free Microsoft Expression Studio 2
11. Free XNA Game Studio 3.0
Read more here to know how you can get this.