>Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop will provide a simple, end-to-end development experience for developing Windows desktop applications targeted to run on all versions of Windows supported by Visual Studio 2012.
From my reading of corporate speak this appears to say that you can use Express Desktop 2012 (VNext Ultimate Web Cloud Edition :)) to write apps that target Vista, Windows 7 or Windows 8. Since WinRT is Win8+ only that would seem to imply 'down level' apps would need to be written in something else. The primary candidates would seem to be WPF/Silverlight, MFC, Winforms or Win32. Since Winforms/MFC are just thin wrappers over the Win32 APIs I think it would be torturous to try and make an IDE that allowed writing WinForms/MFC but somehow prevented direct Win32 access (especially given the ability to simply use pInvoke from managed code).
From my reading of corporate speak this appears to say that you can use Express Desktop 2012 (VNext Ultimate Web Cloud Edition :)) to write apps that target Vista, Windows 7 or Windows 8. Since WinRT is Win8+ only that would seem to imply 'down level' apps would need to be written in something else. The primary candidates would seem to be WPF/Silverlight, MFC, Winforms or Win32. Since Winforms/MFC are just thin wrappers over the Win32 APIs I think it would be torturous to try and make an IDE that allowed writing WinForms/MFC but somehow prevented direct Win32 access (especially given the ability to simply use pInvoke from managed code).