This week's feature article is written by Colin Eberhardt and tackles the issue of sharing code between Silverlight, WPF and Silverlight for Windows Phone. It’s an issue that often comes up in conversation and it’s great to see Colin describe a practical example and demonstrate it’s quite possible to achieve a good degree of efficiency, and thus cost-saving, with a bit of thought. Over to Colin… “Earlier this year, Microsoft released its latest Smartphone OS, Windows Phone 7 (WP7), with handsets being made available globally by late 2010. Developers now have the opportunity to use their Silverlight skills on the mobile platform as well as the web. Furthermore, Silverlight is a subset of WPF, the latest desktop application development framework, allowing skills transfer from desktop, web to mobile, with development for all three sharing the same languages, tools (Visual Studio and Expression Blend), and frameworks. Cross Platform XAML ApplicationsWhilst the possibility of transferring skills between the three platforms is an exciting prospect in itself, what I think is more interesting is the possibility of sharing the same codebase. Silverlight is a stripped down version of WPF, with a few added extras which relate to the web context it lives within. WP7 uses a further stripped down version of the web-based Silverlight, again with a few extras relating to the mobile platform (touch and gesture support for example). What this means in practical terms is that in order to maximise the shared codebase, you need to target the shared parts of each API as much as possible. Read more: Mike Ormond's Blog
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