Welcome!

Still porting that game (now using Windows 8 Consumer Preview). Here’s another round of tips for porting Silverlight apps to Windows 8 metro.

1. There are several predefined animations have been included to make it easier to animate stuff in the look and feel of Windows 8
2. WinRT does not provide any built in pixel shaders available (such as BlurEffect or DropShadowEffect)
3. The syntax for specifying resource paths has changed to reflect the new Appx deployment system. Here's an example of how to reference an image (with build action set to "Content"): ms-appx:/MyAppName/Images/MyImage.png
4. Text rendering is a lot better in Consumer Preview, still not quite as crisp as in HTML though
5. By adopting the metro design language, it's A LOT easier to make your app look good without having to buy your own snowboard (i.e. learn design)
6. If you let those Windows 8 Charms work for you, you can toss a lot of UI elements and focus on your content instead, no more search boxes or "share-to's"!
7. WinRT's interaction API makes coding for mouse/pen/touch a no-brainer
8. While XNA isn't available, DirectX is - but you will need to brush up on your C++ skills to use it in any meaningful way :(
9. The fact that apps always run in full screen mode does make debugging and tracing feel a bit sluggish - oh, and Fiddler is a great substitute for the F12 Developer Tools/Firebug
10. Contrary to WP7 development, WinRT's AppBar give you full control over its content, and there are a lot of predefined icons available

Hope this helps :)

So I got this rather ambitious Silverlight game that I’ve been working on for ages. It’s one of these fun little spare time projects that you sometimes find yourself working really hard at, and sometime doesn’t open for a year or so.

Being really jazzed about WinRT/metro style apps, I thought I might as well jump right into it with a port of my game. Here follows some of my impressions after the a few days spent on porting.

1. Lots of BCL classes missing from metro style apps (most notably serialization specific stuff)
2. A (much to) short list from MS describing what types are missing and how to substitute them can be found here.
3. Even though you won't be downloading assemblies on demand anymore, note that MEF is still around (sweet)
4. While VS2011 currently only supports metro style apps development, you can install VS2010 side by side
5. You can actually add references to assemblies built for the full .NET profile. Probably won't pass certification though…
6. Even though the templates doesn't use it (!?!) - the navigation framework is still around (and is still the preferred way of doing it)
7. You can still embed custom fonts
8. Text rendering is still hopelessly blurry. Compare a vanilla XAML app with a HTML app - HUGE difference :(
9. The async/await keywords make WinRT's heavy use of the async model a no brainer - beautiful!
10. Not having to worry as much about the size of your assemblies feels PRETTY GOOD :)

Porting my app from Silverlight to WinRT has been easier than I expected so far. I’ll post more impressions as soon as I get to spend some more time on this project.