Migrating 8.1 Apps to Windows 10

If you have a Windows 8.1 Store App and you want to move it to Windows 10 UAP then you can easily do that with some minor changes since a Windows 10 UAP is a superset of WinRT. You need to do some UI work to make your app look great on small devices. Underline code is nearly compatible with Windows 10 UAP. If you have a Universal WinRT app then you need to do some more work on adaptivity since only a single binary is created with a Windows 10 UAP that will run across all the devices. You don't need to rewrite all the code but you need to just reorganize things. Let us see how this can be done. This article is based on Jerry Nixon and Andy's Microsoft Virtual Academy Course.

Windows Phone Silverlight Apps

If you want to migrate a Silverlight app to Windows 10 UAP then you need to rewrite code to target the UAP APIs, hopefully, you have used good design patterns and abstracted your logic and then you don't need to do much work. Silverlight 7.x/8.x apps need reimplementation through these apps still run on Windows 10 Mobile devices.

Migrating a Windows 8.1 or Windows Phone 8.1 project

There is no tool in Visual Studio 15 to upgrade the project yet, but there is a PowerShell script to do most of the work. You can get the tool from: https://github.com/Win10DevGuideMVA/ProjectUpgradeUtility After you download the PowerShell file, unzip it and place the unzipped folder in the C Drive. Let's Start

Now, you will find your project migrated to UAP. The PowerShell utility automates most of the upgrade procedure but doesn't guarantee coverage of every scenario.

Manual project file updates

Add publisher to the Package Dependency as in the following: