Building Universal Apps with windows phone 8.1 development

Now we can build windows phone apps using HTML,CSS and java script as same as building windows store apps, these are called universal apps.In order to build these universal apps we need to make some improvements on visual studio 2013 and blend for visual studio 2013.

With latest update of window 8.1 and windows phone 8.1, we can create universal windows apps with windows common run time using XAML/C#/Vb or HTML/JS.It means, we can share all our code and assets between windows 8.1 and windows phone 8.1 apps. We can get the universal apps template for visual studio with Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 RC

We can get 3 tempaltes by installing the Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 RC, blank app let you bring our own code and assets, Hub/Pivot app provides you good example of different container controls and navigation app used to build SPA application.Once we select the project we will get the project structure as shown below

In the project solution we will get 3 nodes: window phone, windows store and shared. Window store node contains code and assets that specific to store app, window phone app node contains code and assets that specific to windows phone and shared node contains the content that shared across the store app and phone app.

The Device Panel:

Blend’s device panel will allows you to preview your app in different resolutions and dimensions without deploying your app into multiple devices.we can check updated configurations that applicable to phone with available displays.

To start building an universal apps we need to download Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 RC or if you don’t have visual studio you can download Visual Studio Express 2013 for Windows with Update 2

I hope these universal apps will reduce a lot effort in windows and phone apps development.