I have to admit I am honestly surprised that Microsoft actually listened to it's customers on this issue. However, the wording in the post makes it a bit vague on whether the compiler itself will simply also target XP, or if there will be some project flag to make it compatible with XP.
Microsoft for all its many faults is very good at listening to customer feedback. Once you consider that their main customers are enterprise and government you begin to understand how many of their decisions get made.
No, that is the C++ team blog and talks about the CRT from 2012 being made to run on XP, which it doesn't at the moment due to it taking reliance on Vista+ platform APIs. This has nothing to do with .NET.
Its interesting to see where MS diverts from this; WP7 and Windows 8. WP7 and Windows 8 are both responses to disruption from iOS and Android.
With WP7 Microsoft jettisoned compatibility with Windows Mobile phones (which had been somewhat popular in enterprise) and with Windows 8, they introduce a radically different UI.
Microsoft has always fucked their partners but they take really good care of their developers and getting started with some pretty powerful stuff (assuming you don't mind using microsofts stack) is cheap and relatively easy.
They take really good care of their developers, unless you're talking about C++11, C99, or OpenGL support.
In which case, NIH-syndrome kicks into full gear.
Their C++11 support is laughable compared to Apple's at this point, they could have bothered to support some of the most basic things in C99, and their continued, purposeful rejection of OpenGL ES on their mobile platforms shows they just don't get it.
Don't get me wrong, they're doing better than they used to in some areas (Windows Phone 8 is proof of that), but they still do some laughably crazy things that are not exactly "tak[ing] really good care of their developers".
I may be wrong, but from what I understood, it's going to be the same as it is today with .Net. I mean, in .Net, you can choose the target framework in Project properties [1].
So, by saying "Multi-targeting enables developers to take advantage of the new features of the IDE", I think that they will make the same thing... You choose your "target framework" (compiler + libraries) inside Project properties, and that's it, the IDE handles the rest.
No, their whole article is lawyer/marketoid speak:
They spent most of the article to claim "we already have Multi Targeting" only to wrap inside that actually you need another version of VS (the older VS 2010) to target XP:
"Developers wishing to target Windows XP can use Visual Studio’s C++ multi-targeting feature, which enables the use of the Visual Studio 2010 compiler from within the new IDE."
Note 2010. Note that you use new IDE but you can't use no new language features from 2012, meaning you don't use anything from 2012 except the new (black icons) IDE, everything is compiled with VS 2010 then.
Then finally in the last few sentences: "Later this fall, Microsoft will provide an update to Visual Studio 2012 that will enable C++ applications to target Windows XP."
There will be an update for VS 2012 sometime this fall with which you'll be first time able to use VS 2012 to compile software which will run on XP. Before that update comes VS 2012 won't produce the native code that runs on XP.
I'm very glad they decided there will be this update. They reversed the decision based on which they made the release of the Visual Studio.
It sounds like you are calling the article "lawyer speak" because they included a "background" section. The rest of the article lays out what the current problems are, what they are going to do about it, and when they are going to ship. The article seems clear and straight forward. The background section makes it more accessible to people not in the know so that they can understand why these improvements are being made.
Those not in the know don't need the 4/5th of the article speaking about something that is fully irrelevant, namely "Multi Targeting" which has absolutely nothing to do with the native support for Windows XP which is missing as we speak. Visual Studio 2012 was designed to not natively support Windows XP: they actually had to remove the code that already existed in the libraries and the previous version of the compiler which provided the support. Now they decided there will be an update to support it, effectively merging their existing support code back in their libraries that we users can't build for ourselves. That's all to say.
Writing most of the time about "Multi Targeting" was smoke and mirrors, very effective, see for yourself again how molmalo understood the article as a typical example for how they confused those "not in the know."
That is false. They did not remove any code to make it not run on XP. They made additions to the CRT which made use of Vista+ APIs and thus the CRT would not be able to run on XP. They are now going to rewrite the parts that relied on the Vista+ APIs so the CRT (and thus C++ programs that rely on it) will run on XP.
Please give me the supporting info (e.g. changes in CRT VS 2012 versus the one in VS 2010). What I have is the same story but related to Windows 2000 support in previous compilers, and I doubt there's any difference: at the moment they removed support Windows 2000 for those who bought expensive new Visual Studios, they in fact had the proper support properly implemented and used. The proof was that it was even delivered in WDK which used the same new compiler backends:
Up to now removal of support of earlier versions of Windows was never caused by technical limitations but only by "political" decisions. If you have different specific examples please provide them.
Multi-targeting was how the XP support worked before this announcement. The problem was that the main reason to upgrade is to get the new C++11 langauge features, not new IDE features.
With the previous approach you still can't use the new features because the XP support is simply to use the VS2010 compiler within the VS2012 IDE.
This new announcement is that the VS2012 toolchain will support XP directly.
As someone who can only use the subset of C++11 features that both GCC and MSVC both support, I am very pleased with this news.
