So, in other posts I have mentioned what is new as far as Multilingual support and Navigation is concerned. Now it is time to point out other differences.
For those lovers of Blend, it is now gone. Okay, it is still there, but it has lost its’ place on the Project menu. Now you have to right click a xaml file to invoke it. It is definitely a tool to be used.
Isolated Storage seems to have gone. You now use
var localSettings =Windows.Storage.ApplicationData.Current.LocalSettings;
localSettings.Values[“MyFirstVar”] = “Hello Windows”;
if(localSettings.Values.ContainsKey(“MyFirstVar”)
Object value = localSettings.Values[“MyFirstVar”];
or
var roamingSettings =Windows.Storage.ApplicationData.Current.RoamingSettings;
if(roamingSettings.Values.ContainsKey(“MyFirstVar”)
Object Value = roamingSettings.Values[“MyFirstVar”];
Signatures on routines have changed. EventArgs has been replaced by RoutedEventArg.
OrientationChanged has now gone. So has Split if you peeked at Windows 8 development. Use the SizeChanged keyword on the XAML page. Use Windows.Current.Bounds.Width to get the widths value. you can use
ApplicationViewOrientation winOrientation = ApplicationView.GetForCurrentView().Orientation;
if (winOrientation == ApplicationViewOrientation.Landscape)
{
// Landscape layouts
}
else if (winOrientation == ApplicationViewOrientation.Portrait)
{
// Portrait layouts
}
For keyhandling, replace System.Windows.Input.Key.D0 with Windows.System.VirtualKey.Number0.
So how do you do convert a WP7 app to a universal app? Since there is no update button, you will have to do it manually. Unlike WP7/WP8 development, app names have to be unique, so the first step is to reserve the name. The next step is to create a Universal App with that name. As Andy points out in , the UA templates do not fully support navigation, so delete MainPage.xaml and create a new one based on Basic Page.
Within the Windows and Phone folders, create a strings folder as mentioned in the article on the Multilingual toolkit. The first version of you app may be unilingual, but by setting the ground work, adding new languages should be relatively easy. The hard part will be creating all the blarney and screen shots for the marketplace. Luckily, the Multilingual Toolkit can help (It is designed to help handle translations and not all string translatons will be INSIDE the app.).
Within the Shared folder, create a new folder called Old and place the XAML, CS and image files of the WP7 or WP8 project in it. Along with any other data that is needed by the project. This will be your working folder and the items will be removed from the folder as you convert. You did remember to do a backup of the original project? 😉
Within the Windows and the Phone folders, create new XAML with the names used in the original project. Copy the main part of the original XAML to the new XAML files, ignoring the declaration section. Within the Shared folder create a class for the C# code behind and name it with the same name as the code behind. Place the content of the code behind within it ignoring the Usings, Anything with Phone in the name will have to be replaced, so the Usings can be recreated (or in some cases pointed to new locations).
This is a work in progress, so I will be updating this post in the future.
Enjoy.
John Marshall… Visio MVP Visio.MVPs.org
john Visio MVP 