[brudgers]

I've tried porting two Codeplex apps for cinterpreters to WP7.

The one which depended on a .dll couldn't be done because Silverlight doesn't support them.

The other which was self contained took me about three hours because I had no idea what I was doing because I am not a professional programmer by any stretch of the imagination.

I spent another hour creating a user interface so I could test it.

[dpark]

Windows 8 doesn't share a codebase with WP7 (except perhaps at a very low level). The Metro stuff on W8 is built on the new WinRT API/framework. What's hard to port to WP7 may be trivial to port to W8.

Disclaimer: I work for MSFT, but don't have any internal knowledge of W8 or WP7 that isn't public.

[brudgers]

Given the ease with which I was able to port one project from codeplex, I am not surprised that Microsoft is lining up the ducks.

The project which I couldn't port (Ncalc) relied on ANTLR and thus a .dll.

The other (Irony) was .NET based and the main difficulty was cleaning up the structure created by VS Professional to Work with Visual Studio for Windows Phone [Express] and converting the console based code to event based...and that was easy even for me.

[MatthewPhillips]

Anything that involves saving files will have to be reworked, since you no longer can use System.IO.. I'm trying to port a compression library and have run into this issue.

[dpark]

Good to know. A quick search online indicates that System.IO isn't gone, but does have a reduced set of classes. That could definitely affect some apps.