Well, the desktop version of Visual Studio 2012 Express is out, and I made a trial clickonce installer for SGDK2, and that much works great (better than in .NET 4.0 and Visual C# 2010 Express), but then I noticed that the sample project looked wrong. As it turns out, something is causing the layers to draw in the wrong order (the generated code is hardwired to draw them in the wrong order) when the project is compiled under .NET 4.5. My guess is that something about .NET datasets changed (SGDK2 files are saved .NET datasets) so that the sorting works differently. Anyway, I'll be investigating. I'm just glad it was something as simple as a sort order and not something as painful as alpha blending/translucency stopped working. Making some progress, but life's busy these days, so it's slow progress.