How to target both windows phone 8 and 7.5

Question

My app is ready and is too simple, just a panorama and some pivots, nothing specific to windows phone 8.

Before sending it I want to make sure that it will work on WP8 and also WP OS 7.1. I saw in the documentations that if we target 7.1 it will work on 8 too, but at the first I have choosed targeting windows 8 and now seems I can't change it in the App properties.

• How can I know if it will work on OS 7.1 properly? ( I have not access to emulator, just a WP8 device)
• How can I make it to work on both systems?

Answer 1

just a panorama and some pivots, nothing specific to windows phone 8.

Panorama and Pivot are specific to WP8, as the implementation of the controls were completely changed to have better performance on WP8.

So your code won't be compatible with 7.1 at all. So unless you want to write a WP7 app and let it run on WP8 with worse performance than a WP8 app, you cannot have a shared UI codebase.

For libraries, I'll recommend using Portable Class Librarie

Answer 2

Your 7.1 app will work fine on Windows Phone 8 without any additional modifications.

I believe you meant that you have access to the emulator only and not a device , otherwise it would be really easy to check how the app behaves on Windows Phone 8 hardware.