Universale Apps

You can now have a single solution that targets both Windows Phone and Windows 8.1 at the same time. Allegedly you will also be able to target XBox in the future. This is called universale apps. I like the sound of that. My current projects only support Windows 8.1. It would be nice if the same build can crank out Windows Phone or XBox targets too.

The way it works is that you have one solution with with multiple projects in it. Two of the projects are for Windows Phone and Windows 8.1. The other is a shared project. The shared project name ends with shproj. The shared project is like a library and does not output a package. It also cannot be the startup project in Visual Studio.

Speaking of VS, you need Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 to be able to do universal apps. Of course you will also need to be developing on Windows 8.1. Me, I like to code in C++. However if you write code in JavaScript, you can utilize third party frameworks. You know that is popular in the JavaScript world.