Microsoft, Win XP and Visual Studio 11

[Theo Gottwald]

I am not using any VS but i know that some people here use it, besides PowerBasic.
For those the following statements may be of interest.

Visual Studio 11 also for Windows XP

Hi Martin,
It was great to see you at ADC C++ this week! Just so that there is no confusion for the readers of your blog, the issue of XP support for C++ in Dev11 is one we're taking very seriously, and we're continuing to take customer feedback on Dev11 beta. However, we are not yet prepared to make an announcement on platform support for the RTM version of Dev11. We will be making an announcement on this in the coming weeks.
Thanks!
Steve

"Thanks for your email. We continue to devote resources to and support MFC in Dev11. The Windows XP issue is still unsettled, and I appreciate your feedback on this. You me have seen that I posted some of my thoughts on XP support in the comment thread of this blog entry on the VC++ team blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2012/04/18/10295093.aspx

[Mike Stefanik]

This has had Windows developers (who use Visual Studio) up in arms for a while now. How Microsoft could even think of releasing a compiler that can't target Windows XP -- while XP is still a supported platform -- is really beyond me. And it's not really a technical issue per se; they could modify the CRT to check the platform, but they really just don't want to do it.

On a personal note, I'm also not really impressed with the new Visual Studio UI or the performance thereof. At this point, I don't see any compelling reason to switch from VS2010.