I like this quote

and just the other day I caught myself wondering who will clean out my Inbox after I’m dead

I think that it's bad to become too dependent on a certain tool, especially if that tool is owned by microsoft, although in this case your dependent on various microsoft api:s anyway so that's probably a bigger problem in that regard. Experimenting with programing without Visual Studio is a good idea and will probably teach you lots of things about yourself and microsoft api documentation in this case. If microsoft has built a system that is so impractical that you need visual studio to navigate it, that's a pretty bad sign for the health of the microsoft ecosystem, but that's not exactly surprising anyone