I’m still on VS2013 because I experienced that XP support is broken on later versions of VS: It compiled fine with v1x0_xp, but binaries and dlls didn’t work when testing under XP. Has someone here successfully created XP compatible plugins with a version > 2013 of VS?
Otherwise it’s probably time to finally drop XP support.
Related discussion: Building with MSVC 2015 for Windows XP