The conference Advanced C++ for Developers was held in Ohlstadt, Germany (in the Zugspitzland ;-)) on May 3rd and 4th 2012. Organized by Microsoft for professional C++ developers, it was about parallelism in C++, Metro apps in C++, etc.

Officials from Microsoft Visual C++ team were present: Boris Jabes (who already came several times to visit European C++ developpers), and Steve Teixeira, Product Manager.

Martin Richter, a German MVP who attended this conference, reports on his blog that this question was asked: «  Will Visual Studio 11 support application development for Windows XP?  ».

Steve Teixeira answered this question.

The statement he made was to reiterate the comments he made on the
Visual C++ team blog http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2012/04/18/10295093.aspx
• they made this decision early in the dev11 cycle
• they miscalculated to the utility of multi-targeting for scenarios that are important to customers and the need customers would have to support XP at RTM time
• they likely would have made a different decision had they known then
what they know now
• they have nothing to announce regarding XP support in Dev11, but they would make a statement in the next few weeks

In short, this decision has not yet been made, and last night’s Q&A did not constitute an announcement that a decision had been made.

Many Visual C++ users hope Windows XP support will be available in VS11. The issue of XP support for C++ in VS1111 is one they are taking very seriously, and they are continuing to take customer feedback on Dev11 beta.

Martin Richter, who attended this conference, thinks that VS11 might support Windows XP, with a service pack, although no official announcement has been made yet.