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Do Windows Phone 8 Application developed for Windows Phone 8 device will run on Windows Surface Tablets (RT & 8.1)? Kindly clarify me.

Could you please suggest me on, what are the changes required for migrating the application.

JasonMArcher
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Kathir
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3 Answers3

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Take a look on the Portable class library.

It allow you to share your code between different platform.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg597392(v=vs.110).aspx

This blog clearly explains how to use it : http://blogs.msdn.com/b/stephe/archive/2012/05/07/partager-du-code-entre-plate-formes-gr-226-ce-224-la-portable-class-library-1-4.aspx

Anyway you got specific dev to do.

Louis Creteur
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  • Thanks for the information Louis. We have already completed the windows phone 8 application and launched in windows phone store. We are in need of migrating the wp app to windows tablet app. Do we need to re-work all the codes and designs? – Kathir Jan 30 '14 at 11:21
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You will need to rewrite many portions of the application. It's difficult to be more precise as you did not describe anything about your application.

The UI, assuming you select C# and XAML for the Windows 8 modern application will need a significant amount of changes. While there will be a significant amount of knowledge overlap and technology similarity, the UI will not be portable. The components are similar, but for example, you've probably used the Windows Phone toolkit which is not available for a Windows 8 store application. Another consideration is that on the larger screen sizes, you'll ideally want to use a different layout of your application.

For the business logic, you may be able to use much of it as is. However, anything that deals with the file system or network (and more) will not necessarily be portable. You could use a portable class library for some features, but you may still need platform specific code.

While this all may sound like a tremendous amount of work, I'd actually like to suggest that it's not. The platforms are very similar, the development environment will be identical, and some amount of UI work would have been necessary anyway. Assuming you create two applications, the structure might look like this:

PhoneApplication
Windows8Application
DataModel
PortableClassLibraryStuff
PhoneSpecific
Windows8Specific
WiredPrairie
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A lot of differences beetween WinRT and WP8 API makes porting much more difficult. But if you are still interested in this topic I can suggest you

  1. Waiting for WP8.1 and W8.1 Update 1 API combination or
  2. Writing your own little framework in a portable class library for navigation, setting, notification, ... support. I already did that work and there are a lot of possibilities for code sharing (resources can be completely shared with the binding notation of WP8). For more information please visit the opensource github project: Github MultiPlatform Framework sample. You will still need to rewrite a lot of xaml code but the leaked footage of the WP8.1 API already showed that we will be able to use much more shared UI code :-)
Viktor Hofer
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