Pontoon

A flexible bridge to the Universal Windows Platform

Project Description

The libraries were originally created to add ready-made Search, Share and Settings functionality and more to Windows Phone and Windows Embedded Handheld following the Windows 8 “Charms”. The project was previously known as “Charming Apps”. Since then we extended our reach across all the Windows platforms and onto Xamarin iOS and Android. The goal was to make Microsoft’s “Universal Apps” much more universal adding missing APIs to provide a more consistent developer experience on all platforms. It allowed you to share more code across platforms and provide a migration route to UWP. While now obsolete you can see a more full-featured attempt to provide cross-platform UWP/WinUI in the Uno Platform.

Requirements

These APIs supported Windows Phone and Windows Embedded Handheld 8.0 and 8.1, Windows 8.1, Xamarin iOS and Xamarin Android, Windows Vista and later and of course Windows 10. It worked with Visual Studio 2015 and the required platform SDKs. These libraries made use of the Windows Phone Toolkit on Windows Phone 8.0 in order to support features such as page transitions. These libraries supported C# and VB.NET development only and not native C++ apps/games.

Usage

The API was packaged into a single DLL. Where functionality overlapped with WinRT/UWP types are mapped automatically to the native implementation. The releases were available through NuGet. As a PCL version is included you could call these APIs from a shared PCL and in deployment it was be replaced with the correct target version.

NuGet

The latest version is available on NuGet.

GitHub

The Pontoon project is hosted on GitHub.