Summary

This chapter built on the foundational concepts of XAML and the Visual Studio designers that were covered in Chapter 21, and the Windows Store application development concepts in Chapter 23, to enable you to write XAML applications for Windows Phone. We discussed the various components of the Windows Phone application and system architecture, including a brief comparison between the “old” Silverlight approach to Phone development and the new roadmap, which relies heavily on WinRT XAML libraries. We discussed the Windows Phone application lifecycle and some of the subtle differences between the Phone and Windows version of the XAML components. Finally, we pulled the phone information together with the prior WPF and Windows Store information in this book and pressed that into play to build a fully functional “Universal app” that compiles and runs against either Windows Phone 8.1 or Windows 8.1.

In the next chapter, the last in the book, we take the cross-platform device development story to the next stage with a discussion of Cordova and writing for non-Windows platforms.