What is special about the executables compiled with Visual Studio 11 which results in that the executables cannot be executed on Windows XP?

Question

I compile my C++ source code with Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview. I statically link to the runtime library.

The resulting executable cannot be executed on Window

Answer 1

The runtime libraries bundled with VS 2010 and higher enforce your executable to import two new functions from kernel32.dll that are missing on Windows XP: EncodePointer and DecodePointer. Those are needed for yet another idiotic naive attempt to enhance the software "security".

In VS 2010 there is an option to use the runtime libraries of Visual Studio 2008, which solves this problem. I don't know if there's such an option in later versions of VS.