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구글과인터넷/EngInfo

Windows 8 Apps Will Run Just as Well On Windows Phone, Says Sinofsky

Steven Sinofsky of Microsoft has recently demonstrated that apps written for Windows 8 tablets can be easily made to run on Windows Phone devices. The developers do not have to do much in order to port their general Windows 8 apps to Windows Phone. This is big news because developers are generally not even used to having easy (or any, for that matter) portability even between mobile platforms, forget between two different class of devices. However, this has been made possible by Microsoft because Windows 8 was designed to be a single platform across all of these devices and that includes everything.

According to Sinofsky, if you have developed an app for Winodws 8 that runs on a tablet, all you have to change one line of code in order to make it run on Windows Phone. That’s it! No major modifications, no rewriting of the app from ground up in a different language, no hassle. Windows 8 apps are expected to be written in Silverlight and some other platforms. And Windows Phone apps can either be written in XNA Studio Framework or with Silverlight. Hence, using Silverlight as the common link that binds the two, developers can easily write an app once and then deploy it to many different kinds of devices.

If this sounds like something that would be lucrative for app developers, it is because it is very lucrative. Cross-device compatibility at this little effort has been a holy-grail of sorts in app development and even though their have been attempts in all devices classes before (Java, Flash, etc.), Microsoft has actually made it possible by simply using the same platform on all devices. And hence the platform itself is now device-agnostic.

microsoft has always had this plan with Silverlight and it became clear when they launched Windows Phone 7. Silverlight is being pushed to become the mainstay of development for Microsoft. And now that Windows has been completely re-imagined, Silverlight is ready to take stage front and center. Developers should not have any reason to complain though. They had enough time to see this coming. Plus if then don’t care about portability, the languages that have been traditionally used for Windows will still be usable. So no one’s left behind.


  What Microsoft is hoping to do here is to make things as good for developers as possible. So that when Windows 8 finally goes public next year, Microsoft’s own app market will be thriving with new life. But whether that will really happen or not only time can tell.