Future proofing your Windows Phone apps

  • Article

How do you ensure that an app built for an earlier release of Windows Phone continues to work great on Windows Phone 8?

Andrew Whitechapel provides some tips for future proofing your apps and readying them for the next release of Windows Phone. There are three aspects to this issue that Andrew touches on:

  • Compatibility: Even though almost everything is different, our app platform maintains a high degree of backward compatibility. So, from the perspective of the platform APIs, you generally don’t have to do anything – your app should just continue to work, without any changes. Where this becomes a little less cut-and-dried is if you’re doing anything unusual or unsupported in your app (more below).
  • Version resilience: You can’t predict the future, so the whole notion of “future proofing” is a little misleading. However, once the future has arrived, you still need to deal with it: how do you make sure your app runs correctly on multiple versions of the platform which support growing sets of features?
  • Hardware resilience: Third, Windows Phone 8 also introduces support for a wider range of physical devices. This means that there are more optional hardware features, and a wider range of capabilities within the non-optional features. A smart developer will accommodate this by building flexibility into his app, to handle the conditions where some feature is not available, or is less capable.

Read the full article at: https://windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev/archive/2012/09/12/future-proofing-your-apps.aspx