Windows Phone 8.1 Store VS Windows Phone 8.1 Silverlight

Question

When I create new Windows Phone project I have an option to create a \"Windows Phone\" or \"Windows Phone Silverlight\" app. I know that they have different runtimes and dif

Answer 1

Windows RT Xaml is quite new and People have to generate some knowledge first.

Silverlight for phone has been around for years and there's a load of tools available: Phone Toolkit, diverse Controls, etc. Just killing it off would have hurt many developers who built up intellectual property over a long time forcing them to start over.

When starting a project with Silverlight you will have more things around that help you get stuff done.

When starting with WinRT Xaml, you will have better performance, but will have to figure a lot out by yourself.

So the Silverlight option is there to not throw of Silverlight developers.

I recently started a new project on WinRT Xaml and my experience was that I had to recreate a lot of common tools like Caches, etc. But also a lot of things that were in Toolkits previously are now part of the platform itself. Also, when moving over to Windows 8, you get to share a lot of code which is nice.