Windows Phone or Windows Phone Silverlight
I just installed Windows 8.1 and then installed Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition.
I tried to create a Windows Phone app and found out that there are two ways to create it (in fact, if you count Universal Apps, if I'm not mistaken)
- Windows Phone
- Windows Phone Silverlight
Can someone please tell me what is the difference between these two? I read a couple of articles but still don't get it, and it's all very confusing.
When I tried to create a Windows Phone Silverlight project, it asked me if I wanted to target 8.0 or 8.1.
When I tried to create a Windows Phone project, it asked me to get a developer license and didn't ask for version 8.0 or 8.1.
What should I choose if my goal is to create an app for mobile devices (tablets / phones) that will work on maximum devices running Windows Phone 8?
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Windows Phone 8 Silverlight is the older user interface on Windows Phone 8. WinRT XAML is used for Windows Store apps (these are Universal Apps). Windows Phone 8.1 Silverlight is slightly different as described here .
Windows Phone Silverlight, although older, is better in some ways. If your goal is to develop a phone-only application that has nothing to do with porting to Win8 / RT, go for Silverlight. Background audio is a mess in WinRT. Speech recognition with Cortana is worse.
WinRT XAML controls are buggy. For example, WinRT XAML has a clear performance hit MapControl
, while Silverlight has smoother performance .
On the other hand, there is .NET Native in Windows Store apps that converts C # to native C ++ code, resulting in performance gains.
For newbies, I would suggest starting with Windows Phone 8 Silverlight apps.
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Windows Phone Silverlight is the "old" platform on which WP8.0 applications are based. He asked to target 8.0 or 8.1 because WP8.1 has a hybrid mode that allows you to build WP8.1 apps, but still have access to the Sliverlight API if you have a lot of legacy code that you would not want to port through simply until.
Windows Phone is a (mostly) Universal Platform for WP8.1 based on the Windows Runtime.
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