Windows Phone 8 PCL libs for cross-platform development

1
votes

I'm writing cross-platform app for iOS, Android & Windows Phone 8.

I have a massive common class library that compiled 100% for both iOS and Android using the Xamarin tooling and their "silverlight subset" of the .NET core libraries.

Ironically, when compiling that same standard code for Windows Phone 8 an amazing number of useful .NET core API's are gone, missing or moved.

This poses a serious issue for my cross-platform code since now the data and processing tiers are not cross-platform at all.

I used a Microsoft.Bcl.Compression PCL to solve some of the missing API's but there's still a whole bunch others missing.

Question is, how do Xamarin users suggest overcoming these limitations to achieve cross-platform as advertized? It doesn't seem possible at all to share a common code base between (ios/android) and WP8. Perhaps between iOS and Android only but throw in WP8 and not even ASCII strings are supported! Shock! Horror!

Is there a "silverlight subset" PCL for WP8 or are we just not supposed to support WP8 at all?

1
.netwindows-phone-8xamarin.iosxamarin.android

1 Answers

1
votes

This is a limitation of Windows Phone 8: just too many good things are missing.

I have not tried it, but perhaps Windows Phone 8.1 has a few more APIs that you could use?