Visual C++ is just the product name, it's branding. It has no functional meaning beyond that.

As for the standards, there's pretty good partial support for C++11/14/17. One fairly recent blog post by them has some tables. [1]

[1] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2016/01/22/vs-2015-u...

Years ago Microsoft introduced Visual Basic, which had some drag and drop programmability. It was popular and so Microsoft management decided to put "Visual" in front of everything. And now it means nothing. Kinda like how IMax used to mean large movie screens, and it was popular so now that company calls everything the do "IMax" and it now meanscnothing.

To add a bit more of context to TwoBit's answer, since the mid-90's, the only C++ compiler that was really visual is C++ Builder[1].

It is great for GUI applications, you get to develop C++ applications as if they were Delphi, VB ones, with all the power of C++.

For Microsoft, the lame MFC was already visual enough. To be faire to Microsoft the original MFC was much more powerful, .NET style, but many didn't like it that way, hence the thin layer over Win32 APIs[2].

However since Windows 8 and the introduction of Windows App Model, Visual C++ has actually become Visual. When developing Windows apps based on the new APIs introduced to replace Win32, you can develop pure native applicatins in C++ using XAML and the exactly the same RAD tooling as .NET WPF applications.

[1] https://www.embarcadero.com/products/cbuilder

[2] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/microsoft.public.vc....