Build for both–introducing WpWinNl

Intro

As I alluded to in a few previous posts, I have been working on a merged version of both my Windows Phone and Windows 8 libraries on Codeplex: wp7nl and win8nl. I have now come to the point that I think it is ready for use and/or some community feedback, so I just released WpWinNl to CodePlex and NuGet. The first ‘good’ version is 1.0.1, immediately superseded by 1.0.3 containing the new cross platform DevicePairConnectHelper.

I’ve cut some old stuff that merely introduced dependencies and that no-one used anyway, and I ported stuff that was missing in Win8nl from Windows Phone and back. Provided it makea sense – since there is no FlipView in Windows Phone, I did not port the FlipViewPanoramaBehavior. 

People may be shocked to see that it is mainly a Windows 8.1 project, and that the Windows Phone project contains mainly links. No, I am not trying leave Windows Phone – I just found out that most Windows 8 code compiles unchanged on Windows Phone, but not the other way around. See the things that I ran into when I was porting reflection-riddle code – it’s better to bite the bullet on Windows 8, then Windows Phone usually follows suit. The investment the Phone team made moving to a common kernel really pays off that way

It is still a work in progress, as any good library should be.

FAQ

• What? Are you abandoning Windows Phone 7?
  • Yup. Sorry. Gotta move forward. I push you forward into the new era whether you want it or not ;-) . Seriously, I have enough #ifdef code as it is now. And for those that don’t want to go along – the old library wp7nl still exists, and most of the code will still compile under Windows Phone 7.
• What? Only support for Windows 8.1, no Windows 8 anymore?
  • Yup. See previous question.
• Is this fully and thoroughly tested?
  • Nope. This is the tool I needed to make to make cross-platform apps myself. I will probably run into errors. So will you. Contributions and fixes are accepted
• You are now the only dev registered on the project. Are you taking sole control of the project again?
  • Don’t be silly – if you want to contribute as a developer, just let me know. I just did not get around to adding the people that contributed to the ‘parent projects’.
• Why only platform specific libraries? Why not PCL?
  • Most of the code I write makes at some point use of the System.Windows or the Windows.UI.Xaml namespace. That does not fit into PCL anyway, so at this point I think the benefits of having PCL do not outweigh the extra hassle of having source code in three potential spots.

Enjoy!