How do I get my Windows Phone 7 app to show up in the Windows Phone 8 marketplace?

Question

I must be doing something wrong when I\'m doing my builds. I want my current update to be available for Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8. I am using the WP8 SDK and tar

Answer 1

DevCenter and the WP runtime works as following:

• You can have one WP7 XAP and that could run on both WP7 and WP8.
• -or- You can have one XAP for WP7 and one (or more) XAPs for WP8. The "or more" part comes in for multiple resolutions.

However, there's no way to take a WP8 project compiled in VS2012 and run it on WP7. You can't run WP8 XAPs on WP7. That's pretty obvious once we think about it since the assemblies being used in WP8 aren't available on WP7.

So, developers have to choose which code sharing model across WP7 and WP8 works for their app:

1. if your app only uses WP7 featuresets and looks OK on WP8 HD, use a WP7 XAP.

2. If your app only partially uses WP8 featuresets, create on WP7 XAP, and share the codebase to create WP8 XAP that lights-up with WP8 featursets.

3. And if your app must have WP8 featuresets (e.g. NFC or Bluetooth centric apps, etc) then you obviously can't target WP7 and can only submit WP8 XAPs.

Here's a print screen demoing the DevCenter support for submitting multiple XAPs for the same app on different platform versions and different resolutions:

For more information on how to target both WP7 and WP8 see this Nokia developer article. The article explains how to share code between WP7 and WP8 at runtime & compile time, what new features are WP8 exclusive and how to support multiple resolutions. I helped author that article so hopefully you'll find it useful. There's lots of helpful techniques that might not be obvious.