Move from Windows Phone Silverlight to WinRT

Larry Lieberman (product marketing director at Microsoft) and I chatted today about porting your Windows Phone Silverlight apps to the Windows Runtime. Here's the video recording: https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Inside-Windows-Platform/Inside-Windows-Platform--Going-from-Windows-Phone-Silverlight-to-Windows-RT-XAML.

Once you take a look at the porting guidance on MSDN (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh452743.aspx), you might be surprised at how easy the process is and how readily your knowledge and experience of XAML platforms in general carries over. And, once you're in the Windows Runtime world, you're using the exact same technology that Windows Store apps use, so your code is primed and ready to build for both. Windows Runtime also supports native development with modern C++, and all the goodness of the C++11 standard. You can write native Direct3D code in a Windows Store app and in a Windows Phone Store app, of course, and you can combine XAML and Direct3D in the same page.

Here are links to the second and third case studies in the series. Topics supporting those case studies and describing them in more detail are due early next year, but the source code here will get you started:

Bookstore2: Windows Phone Silverlight source code

Bookstore2: Windows Runtime source code

Bookstore3: Windows Phone Silverlight source code

Bookstore3: Windows Runtime source code

 

Cheers!

Steve