Since it is not really clearly indicated in the documentation provided by Intel, it is possible to use the code coverage function provided by Intel XE Composer 2011 with VS2005. The only problem is that the results generated by the tool are not very user-friendly (html pages), and that some operations have to be done manually once the execution tests are finished.

This post describes the steps to follow in order to compile a C++ project created under VS2005 (or even VC6), and to migrate it to a VS2010 .vcxproj one, but keeping VS2005 as compiler (v80 configuration in the General tab, Platform Toolset entry of the project properties).

This is possible with the Platform toolset available on the General tab of the project configuration. By default, you can target either VS2010 (platform target v10) or VS2008 (platform target v9).

The platform toolset selection is available as follow: