Its nice to see that C++ has evolved to the point where COM code can be represented with nice easy-to-follow vanilla C++ without making you want to throw up!! (and theres no stupid ^ (hat) symbol in sight)
Close enough for most people, but no. Based on their latest update[0], at the minimum it'll be missing attribute expression SFINAE, an unfucked preprocessor, and unfucked (C++98) template name lookup. If you're feeling charitable the latter two could be called bugs rather than missing features (and bugs that will break a bunch of existing code when they're fixed).
I remember using the obscure comet library to abstract COM in C++ ( https://github.com/alamaison/comet ) because the COM support in C++ required more knowledge.
I remember a white paper outlining MS's initial attempts (c. 2000?) to add additional syntax to C++ in order to save developers from much of the quagmire that was COM programming in C++, before abandoning the whole thing in favour of .NET. So nice to see that the language can now suppport that effort natively.
The Community Edition wasn't available when you bought your VS2012, nor when I bought my VS2013+MSDN subscription. It's something new from about a month ago.
Am I right in thinking the wonderful features VC++ 2015 introduces that render most of C++/CX irrelevant were in fact supported by GCC and CLang several years before C++/CX was even released?
2.9 was the first version of Clang with C++11 stuff (outside of the features which everyone happened to support as extensions to C++03), released several months before C++/CX in April 2011. It's easy to forget these days with how impressive their progress has been, but it wasn't that long ago that Clang was the neat project that people hoped would turn into a usable compiler. The C++14 bits used weren't even proposed yet when C++/CX was released, so C++/CX may have been needed even if VC++ was fully caught up with the standards.
It looks like Kenny Kerr has a site specifically for this here: http://moderncpp.com/ and a video explaining things here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nvh3MePAzKs