Windows and Windows Phone Architectures

The Windows Modern (Windows Store) environment and Windows Phone 8 have architectures with some overlapping elements. Windows 8.1, Windows RT, and Windows Phone 8 use the same Windows kernel, but differences in higher-level architectural elements should be considered when development teams plan applications that will run on both Windows and Windows Phone.

The XAML framework for user interface implementations supports some common elements on the Window Store and Windows Phone 8 platforms, but namespace differences require developers to implement separate source code. The DirectX library is the same for Windows Store and Windows Phone 8 applications and code can be shared, although the overlap is not depicted in this illustration.

The subsets of the .NET Framework APIs supported for Windows Store and Windows Phone 8 applications are different, but there are commonalities. Visual Studio provides a Portable Class Library project template that allows developers to build code that uses .NET APIs common to the two platforms and create code that can be compiled once and run on both platforms.