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Windows Phone

Charming Share now “lights up” on Windows Phone 8.1

Charming Share provides a share API for Windows Phone 8.0 projects which mimics the built in support in various system apps and exposes an API which is the same as that available in Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1. Now that we have a full Sharing feature in Windows Phone 8.1 we can take advantage of this from both AppX and Silverlight 8.1 projects. But what if you need to continue using a Silverlight 8.0 project?

Well the answer is to use Charming Share as it is now smart enough to determine when it is running on an 8.1 device and defer to the system Sharing feature. To quickly illustrate here are screenshots from the same 8.0 project running on both 8.0 and 8.1:-

Charming Share on Windows Phone 8 Charming Share on Windows Phone 8.1

The eagle-eyed amongst you will notice the 8.1 list is quite sparse – this is because it’s taken from the Emulator which has no email accounts or social apps installed. But imagine Facebook etc and any other third-party apps appearing in this list.

In terms of look and feel, I don’t have any plans to change the look of the 8.0 sharing screens – these are designed to match the system as this is how the sharing features appear in Windows Phone 8.

Now that there are so many platforms to cover I’ve changed the main documentation page into a feature matrix so it is easier to compare functionality across platforms and app models

 

By Peter Foot

Microsoft Windows Development MVP