TechEd India 2014 Recap – Migrating your WP8 Silverlight App to WP8.1 RT

I am very happy to say that I got the chance to present a session on Migrating your WP8 Silverlight App to WP8.1 RT. It was mostly based on the post which I had written earlier. Though, this time I had a good audience who have already tried migrating and faced certain kind of issue. In this post, all I am going to do is push the top 5 questions which I had got there.

Q1: What is the need to migrate? or Why should I migrate?
Though this is the very basic question, but this was one of the most asked questions. Whenever, we here words like Migrating or Upgrading, we start to get a bit scared. Well the only reason is that we as developers want our app to have lots and lots of features and we don’t want to go back one step and then upgrade our code to get the same or even older kind of look. But what we forget is that, deep down when the architecture and platform are released and our apps are already migrated then we can have various advantages. I can name a few:

  • Page Transitions are now native
  • Universal App readiness
  • Debugging

Well, the most important of them all is Universal App readiness. We would love to push our apps to multiple platforms. The only reason we are not doing still is because we don’t have the time. But if you think about it, migrating from WP8 to WP8.1 RT already does more than half of your job. Once migrated, you get the advantage of WP8.1 and most of your code along with UI can be Shared in a SharedProject.

Q2: Any important points to keep in mind?
There are various important things to keep in mind. However, they all vary based on scenarios or the type of App you are migrating or even building new. Let’s jot down a few:

  • Scalability: Not talking about Cloud but Scalability in terms of pushing the same app in multiple platforms.
  • Code Reusability: Want to push your app for Windows Store? Well, the moment you migrated your app, your code is now ready to be shared across for Windows Store App. But what if, you want to make use of Xamarin and push the same code for Android and iOS. You can always extract the methods which can work with common .Net code like Models, HttpClient  etc and push them to a PCL (Portable Class Libraries). Once you do this, your code can easily be shared across platforms.
  • Mobile App and not Web App: Keep in mind that the App you are building is for Mobiles and not Web. When you think like that, then you will always think about the Data consumptions and speed. It is always better to make small Web calls than make a single call and wait for over a minute to get everything. Because, that way user will have to wait for a minute and you do not want to test their patience.
  • Activity Indicator: Activity indicators are anything like Progress Bar on the SystemTray or a simple Progress Image. The only reason to make use of this is to notify the user that something is happening. It’s like telling them “Please be patient”.

Q3: How often to update the App?
This is something that needs to be taken care by the developer. The general way of dealing this is by adding some or the other feature and keep your app updated. Rather than trying to release all the features at once, one should try releasing features coded properly without any issues. That way the user will appreciate your app as well.

Q4: What should I do for plug-ins not available for WP8.1 RT?
This is a tricky situation. It depends on what kind of plugin you have made use of. But still, when you reach a point where the plugin is not available, you can always tweak your design. If the design suits your need, then your app size will go down more because the plugin might be of some big size doing various kind of work but you were making it use for a single feature. Now that your design is tweaked, and your code is yours, you can always add new features to it without worrying about anything.

Q5: Once migrated, should I continue updating the WP8 App?
This is totally up to you. You are the developer. If you think that you have the time and energy to maintain the various version of the same app then there is no issue in that. However, if you are not able to then with a single update, you can notify the user that this will be a last update to this app because now the app is being migrated to WP8.1 and they should consider upgrading their Phone to WP8.1. Also, ensuring them of new features will get your users to come to your app. In case, you think there is a major bug in the WP8 app, then you can always fix that issue.

I believe the QnA had many more questions which were technical, but they were mostly based on my earlier post. This QnA is mostly theoretical where I just talk about the experience and sharing some knowledge based on my experience. In case, you have any questions, feel free to reach out.

Happy Coding!!!

Anubhav Ranjan
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