Compiling new Pythons on old Windows compilers

[Eric Frederich]

There is a commercial application which allows customizations through a C
API.
There are 3 different releases of this application each compiled with
different versions of Visual Studio, 2008, 2010, and 2012.

I'd like to release a customization which embeds a Python interpreter, but
I'd like to use the same Python release across all 3 application versions.
There may be versions of Python like 2.7 or something which compile on all
3 of those Visual Studio releases, but I'd really prefer to use Python 3.

Any idea why compatibility was dropped recently?  There used to be a PC
directory with different VS directories in the source tree, now it isn't
there any more.

Thanks,
~Eric