For the past month I have been looking at converting one of my WP7 apps to Metro to run under Windows 8. The actual process of creating a new Windows 8 app is trivial, there are many templates to help in the process. Of course, I was going from an existing app and trying to leverage some of the new features in Windows 8.
The first hurdle was the lack of Pivot and WrapPanel in Windows 8. The Pivot was not a big issue, because it was restrictive on the design and I was forced by Windows 8 to rethink the design. Both were not show stoppers, but they did make me rethink the design. The WP7 design was a Pivot with a secondary page using a WrapPanel for input. The app itself was a means of tracking the results of challenges given during a presentation. In addition to the entry screen, there was a leader board. The new design involves using the leaderboard as the main screen because Windows 8 gives more options on how the screen looks. I am no longer restricted to a basic Pivot.
The second hurdle was getting use to where things are in a Windows 8 solution. Not hard to do, but it did take time.
The third hurdle was the morphing of Resx files to ResW files. Creating the ResW files was just a matter of creating empty files and doing a copy and paste from the ResX files. Luckily, you can select all rows in ResX and use a single paste to ResW. Then there was a bit of time needed to change the format of how the RexW files are acccessed.
Windows 8 has more possibilites, but there is a lot to consider when designing for it. How do you handle full screen, portrait mode or split? The screen has far more real estate than the phone. You no longer are limited to Isolated Storage, so you have more options in how you handle your data.
John Marshall… Visio MVP Visio.MVPs.org
john Visio MVP 