I am using Visual Studio 2012 (v11) which is using a version of MFC that is not yet widely distributed and is incompatible with Windows XP.
I stumbled across this article while searching for a solution and tried it without any success. I figured that it was because there was no Visual Studio 2010 or older installations on my computer.
Use newer Visual Studio Version with an older MFC Version?
Is there a way to compile an MFC application compatible with at least Windows XP on Visual Studio 2012 without any older installations of Visual Studio present?
I don’t think what you want is possible, unfortunately. This article says that there will indeed be XP support this fall when Windows 8 is officially released. But this article says that you will need an installation of Visual Studio 2010 as well. My guess is that VS2012 simply doesn’t have the capability to support XP, and that the update this fall will just kind of link it to VS2010. There might be some unofficial ways to do it, but it seems as if MS is completely dropping XP support, so you’ll probably need VS2010 if you want to develop for it.