MS seems to be pretty much betting their company on their company on the metro interface and their win RT core. I'm curious about how well this core scales to low power devices. What's also important is the migration path from win32 to winRT. Apple has brought most of the backend frameworks from OSX to iOS, which makes porting powerful mac applications easy. Does anyone develop on winRT already?
I am working on a game in C#. I wrote the game originally for WinRT using a "Portable Class Library" for 80-90% of the code. Over the weekend I ported the game to Windows 7 and XNA re-using the portable class library without modification. Naturally the user interface needed to be rewritten but I think that's for the best.
I've built a few cross-platform apps that work both on WP7 and Win8 - as noted before, Portable Class Libraries is a huge help. My web services were fully reused as were all of my base libraries, just had to redo the UI - and between Silverlight and WinRT I was able to copy and paste a lot of my XAML (just a few namespace changes and a couple of minor mods).
I actually did a talk at a user group where I showed a few different apps, then translated them live between the phone, the web, and the tablet.
Thanks for the input. So you can do cross platform if you use these portable class libraries from start. How about about porting win32 code from the .net era? I would guess that most of today's windows applications are running on those libraries, don't they?
I either use a PCL from the start, or I've taken existing code and moved it into the pCL (there are a few tricks to get around due to pieces missing from the various libraries, since they are an overlapping subset).
So if you have existing .net code, I'd try to plug it into the PCL and see which namespaces, etc. are missing then work backwards from there - even if you can only get some of your code, it's a better start than copy/pasting everything IMO.
