Windows Universal Apps announced at BUILD

Posted on 02 April 2014, Last updated on 26 January 2020 by

At the opening keynote of the BUILD developer conference in San Francisco today Microsoft announced something that will completely change the way application development is approached for Windows 8 Phone and Windows 8. Windows Runtime is now going to be supported across both Phone and Modern to allow cross-platform development. Visual Basic tools have been updated to support the new cross-device development mode.

Update: Universal apps coming to Xbox. The Windows dev economy just tipped!

Screenshot (21)_edited

 

Screenshot (22)_edited

In a live demo at BUILD a Windows Phone 8.1 variant was added via a new shared node in Visual Studio, in just a few minutes.

Screenshot (23)_editedScreenshot (24)_edited

The biggest part of the announcement made by Microsoft is that the Store is going to show the multi-platform apps and will allow a cross-platform single-purchase model.

Screenshot (25)_edited

This is a huge, huge announcement that opens the doors to cross-Windows development by reducing the cost to port to almost insignificant amounts of effort and by offering value to consumers through a buy-once, use everywhere model.

Microsoft BUILD press releases and blog posts:

  • The Microsoft press release is available here.
  • The Microsoft Blog has a post about the announcements here. 
  • The Microsoft Experience blog has a post here.

1 Comments For This Post

  1. Alan says:

    This is great news. I don’t have a Windows phone but are there any popular currently phone only apps? I don’t actually have any current plans to switch to a Windows phone but I do plan on getting a Windows 8 UMPC. If I do use a different phone OS other than Android, it’ll probably to test out Ubuntu Touch.

Search UMPCPortal

Find ultra mobile PCs, Ultrabooks, Netbooks and handhelds PCs quickly using the following links:

Acer Aspire Switch 10
10.1" Intel Atom Z3745
Acer C740
11.6" Intel Celeron 3205U
VIA Nanobook
7.0" VIA C7-M
Lenovo Ideapad Flex 10
10.1" Intel Celeron N2806
Acer Aspire E11 ES1
11.6" Intel Celeron N2840
Dell Chromebook 11
11.6" Intel Celeron 2955U
Dell Latitude E7440
14.0" Intel Core i5-4200U
Acer TravelMate B113
11.6" Intel Core i3
HP Elitebook 820 G2
12.5" Intel Core i5 5300U
Acer Chromebook 11 CB3-131
11.6" Intel Celeron N2807