Courier New was the default Visual Studio programming font up to 2008.
I remember when I read Joel’s blog on Consolas as an alternative font, I tried it in my then-current VS environment and did NOT like it due to the aliasing/anti-aliasing effects mentioned in both linked articles.
Font rendering seems to have improved in VS2010/W7 since I did not even notice that Consolas is installed as default in VS2010 😉
Now Adobe released Source Code Pro for download with its focus on distinguishing similar-looking characters such as 1,l,I, 0,0 and B,8.
So many fonts, so little time.