Visual Studio for Alpha existed. At my company none of the third-party libraries we used were available for anything other than x86, but our code compiled and ran on Alpha NT with no problem at all. I'm nearly sure that Office was available too.
I think only the C/C++ development environment existed for those platforms, but I can try to dig more. Maybe I couldn't find them at the precise timeframe I had an Alpha to play with.
I wonder what did it lack... I suspect I couldn't find it because, at the time, I didn't have the full MSDN subscription. I only got it a couple years later, after DEC was acquired by Compaq, who didn't know what to do with Alpha and, by then, that Alpha was looooong gone.
