That is an incredibly stupid idea on Microsoft's part to drop runtime support for XP. I know they are trying hard to force the world off of XP, but it just doesn't work that way. Like it or not, I am going to have to support existing and new applications on XP for years to come. Desktops are starting to transition, but there are still a lot of special purpose machines out there that have no plans to move from XP due to compatibility reasons with test equipment, old software, etc. It's bad enough that VS.next provides no improvement for native, non-metro applications, and that it has implemented very little over 2010 for the new C++ standard. If MS is now going to decide that we can't even target XP systems, we simply will not be able to use VS.next. Sticking with VS2010 isn't a good option either, since it doesn't fully support C++11. It would seem that the only option is to drop VS entirely and move to another vendor's compiler.
Ballmer's new tag line will be "Developers, developers, developers ... where did they all go?"
