For the record, my coworker reports that he has successfully compiled using VS 2010 without changing any of the thirdparty libraries, and the resulting Panda build runs successfully.
I’m not 100% sure I believe this, but that’s the report. In fact, it’s only the C++ thirdparty libraries that are potential problems (the C++ ABI changes with each compiler but the C ABI doesn’t change), and there aren’t that many of those, so maybe it’s true.
So, you might do OK just to edit makepandacore.py and put in the appropriate registry keys. Or simply set the environment variable VCINSTALLDIR to the full path of your MSVC installation directory (makepanda will consult this variable if it can’t find MSVC in the registry).
David