The portable libraries are the response to the growing profile fragmentation in .NET frameworks. With help of portable libraries you can share code between different runtimes without dreadful #ifdef PLATFORM statements or even worse “Add as Link” source file sharing practices. If you have an existing .net class library which you would like to reference from a different runtime (e.g. you have a .NET Framework 4.5 library which you would like to reference from a Windows Store project), you can either ......
The Visual Studio 2012 doesn’t have a UI to set the Target Framework in C++ Projects. Target Framework : 4.0 The online documentation does say to edit the .vcxproj project and change the TargetFrameworkVersion Tag. However, The C++ projects don’t have that tag by default. They just assume that the target framework is v4.0. Instead, you have to add the TargetFrameworkVersion-Tag to the PropertyGroup Globals. 1: <PropertyGroup Label="Globals"> 2: ... 3: <RootNamespace>...<... ......