John
I hate to put a damper on this but no it is not universal. Load a MIDI file natively and try to use ctrl+ outs to change the MIDI outs. That is a bug that CW is aware of. Further it wont work with banks either but not just with MIDI files. If you save the project as a cwp file after a reload the outs will work but not the banks.
In Sonar 8.5 and older this was very easy to do and I had a shortcut F key on my Mackie Control to access this in both cases. This is no longer the case.
I do think the non working of the ctrl key in these instances is a bug and it was not fixed in the A patch.
This is the single biggest workflow killer the X series has leveled to me. If you compose in a notation program and import your midi data to Sonar, this bug really slows you down. I put in a bug report about this when X1 came out.