Graphics using just C++ and OS API's is downright hellish. Personally, I use SFML for all my graphics, audio, networking, and input handling. It's pretty capable, comparable to SDL.

http://www.sfml-dev.org/

Here's some code to get you started:

http://pastebin.com/UyWeRy4W

Edit: It may do well to offer a bit of actual explanation of what is going on in the code. Basically, all we are doing is setting up a window, creating a view for that window, as well as a clock for smooth movement and a drawable object.

Then we enter the main loop which reads events, then inputs, then acts on those inputs. Afterwards, we clear the screen, draw everything, then update. that's basically everything going on in your basic graphics program, read, process, output. Or in this case, events, inputs, update, draw.

Edit 2: It should also be noted that Visual C++ 2012, is just C++ compiled using MSVC 2012. It's no different than C++ compiled with, say, GCC, save for little C++0x and no C++14 support and some MSVC features added to it.

I would reccomend SDL2 which is a more C/barebones way of graphic programming. There are some good tutorials written for it so I'll just link to those since I don't have the skill to do better.

http://libsdl.org/ download and information

http://lazyfoo.net/tutorials/SDL/index.php tutorial.