I find that he comes across a lot better on video than on twitter, seems less dogmatic and his sense of humour is clearer. Most people aren't going to waste time on a stream, so his twitter personality is what they see.
The main windows compiler would have been Visual C++ 6, which was released before standardization, and had notable differences from C++98. It was also buggy for non-trivial templates. Visual C++ 2002 wasn't much better.