What version of Visual Studio to target windows XP builds?

Question

I want to develop a business application using WPF/C# .NET. The application will have lots of modern gui widgets and functionality such as dockable views and a ribbon. The application should also run on Windows XP as well as Windows 7 and 8.

What Visual studio .NET version should I use? I've heard that in VS 2012/2013 you can't target xp. Is that the case?

Answer 1

Use Visual Studio 2013 and develop on a Windows 7/8 system.

You can target XP easily by just changing the .NET framework from 4.5 to 4.0

UPDATE: As @hvd has stated in the comments, be sure you test your product on an XP machine (or on a machine that has only .NET 4.0)
http://news.kynosarges.org/2012/08/01/no-net-4-5-for-xp2003/

Answer 2

Its more of .Net framework and not IDE specific.

.Net 4.5 framework cannot be installed on XP machines. So if you are talking about development machines , its true you can't go with VS 2012/2013 since 4.5 in installed by default with them.

But if you are talking about customer machines here, you can use Windows 7/8 for development with 2012/2013 IDE but project should target .Net 4.0 framework or below .

Answer 3

I think Visual Studio 2013 natively supports .Net v4.5, which does not support Windows XP. Even VS2012 requires Windows 7.

And if you want to target XP then you can switch the .NET version to 4.0. So its about the framework rather than IDE

If you want a XP support on Visual Studio then you have to use the Visual Studio 2010 version.