CODEWITHSUNDEEP
silverlightwindows-phone-8visual-studio-2013windows-phone-8.1
Frank Martin
Frank Martin

Reputation: 3451

Windows Phone or Windows Phone Silverlight

I have 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 of creating it (in fact 3 if you count Universal Apps if I am not wrong)

  1. Windows Phone
  2. Windows Phone Silverlight

Can someone please tell me what exactly is the difference between these two? I read a couple of articles but still don't understand and this whole thing is very confusing.

When I tried to create a Windows Phone Silverlight project then it asked me whether I want to target 8.0 or 8.1.

When I tried to create Windows Phone project then it asked me to get a Developer license and didn't ask about version 8.0 or 8.1.

What shall I chose if my aim is to create an application for mobile devices (tablet/phones) that will run on maximum devices running Windows Phone 8 version?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 498

Answers (2)

Karthik Nishanth
Karthik Nishanth

Reputation: 2020

Windows Phone 8 Silverlight is the older UI on Windows Phone 8. WinRT XAML is used for Windows Store Apps(these are Universal Apps). Windows Phone 8.1 Silverlight is a bit different as explained here.

Windows Phone Silverlight, although older, is better in some ways. If your aim is to develop an app that is targeted only for phones and that doesn't have any use getting ported to Win8/RT, go with Silverlight. Background Audio is a mess in WinRT. Speech Recognition with Cortana is worse.

The controls of WinRT XAML are buggy. For example, there is a clear performance degradation of MapControl in WinRT XAML, whereas, in Silverlight, this is smoother.

On the other hand, Windows Store Apps have .NET Native, which converts C# to native C++ code, resulting in performance gains.

For a beginner, I would advise starting with Windows Phone 8 Silverlight apps.

Upvotes: 6

Paul Abbott
Paul Abbott

Reputation: 7211

Windows Phone Silverlight is the "old" platform that WP8.0 apps are built on. It asked you to target 8.0 or 8.1 because WP8.1 has a hybrid mode that lets you build WP8.1 apps but still have access to the Sliverlight API if you had a whole lot of legacy code you didn't want to port over just yet.

Windows Phone is the (mostly) universal platform for WP8.1 that is based on Windows Runtime.

Upvotes: 1

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