Universal Apps in Visual Studio

With Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 You can see the new changes in New project dialog box in Visual studio. One of them are new project type called Universal App.

With this kind of project template we can create Universal apps fro  Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 once with same solution .

Once project  created in solution explorer you can see that there is  three separate projects

1. Windows 8.1
2. Windows Phone 8.1
3. Shared

With this templates it does is it shared separate section (such as project here) for Model (Coading part and data manipulation).
 All Projects in these ki of solution used that shared code for data manipulation.


With other two projects each one implements their platform specific User interfaces and functionalists with those projects. In here your Windows 8.1 UI codes should be in Windows 8.1 Project and Windows Phone UI codes must be in Windows Phone 8.1 Project.

 As you can see here each project refers the shared code base

And Specialty both Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 Projects are sharing the same App.xaml and App.xaml.cs file. That means it defines the all application build settings to the each platform.

If you need to change something on Windows Phone 8.1 App you need to add that code in between 

#if WINDOWS_PHONE_APP

//Code 

#endif

In Compiling the project you can select which project need to be run like below with debug menu

And finally... Better to add 3rd party references separately with Windows 8.1 an Windows Phone 8.1 projects because there may be some derivations among libraries with two platforms..


Enjoy your Universal app with Visual Studio 203 update 2