If you don't care about the tooling, you should be able to use most any version of VS with most any version of MVC by deleting the MVC-specific project type GUI

If you don't care about the tooling, you should be able to use most any version of VS with most any version of MVC by deleting the MVC-specific project type GUID in your .csproj/.vbproj file. Not sure about EF, but if you don't need the designer (e.g. using code first), I think it should work in previous versions of VS too.