From the experience I have with both of them (which is a bit limited) I really can't tell which one is more beginner-friendly. Both have a professional look and feel, and have almost all the functions you could wish for.
However, if you install MSVC Express you will also need to install .NET 2.0, which you might not care about. Especially if you fully install the Platform SDK and the DirectX SDK (which you'll partly need to compile Spring), MSVC has a significantly bigger footprint than Code::Blocks + MinGW.
But MSVC does have good debugger (as JC already said), and it compiles Spring a whole lot faster (at least on my computer). And because MSVC is just a *bit* more polished than Code::Blocks, I've switched to MSVC

.