Porting Windows 7* Applications to Windows 8* Store Apps (PDF 443KB)

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Overview

This article will guide developers in the process of porting a Windows 7 application to a Windows 8 Store app. We will discuss the design considerations, language options, and more.

Why Convert?

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One compelling reason to create and port applications to Windows 8 is that users will like them more when designed with a touch-first experience in mind. Touch is arguably more natural for certain types of applications, and these applications make good candidates for being ported to Windows Store apps. Some of the types of applications that are well-suited for conversion include:

Casual painting and drawing applications
Games – casual games and hardcore games can both benefit from touch
Content viewing applications – touch-based interaction with the content for zooming, scrolling, etc.

Why would you want to convert a Windows 7 desktop application to a Windows Store app?There are many potential reasons for doing this:

Your application will likely provide a more immersive user experience after enabling it for the Windows 8 touch-based UI
Windows Store is a new source of monetization for your app
Windows UI look and feel is clean, intuitive touch-based UI
Access to Window 8 Runtime APIs, which are new unified APIs for touch, sensors, etc.
Support of the latest HTML5/CSS3 features for building HTML/JavaScript*-based store apps

Let’s take a closer look at some of these compelling reasons.

Windows Store

The store is integrated into the Windows 8 experience. Launched directly from the Start Menu, a familiar tile-based look and feel for browsing and downloading applications quickly.

Here is some more information about using the Windows Store to sell your apps:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/windows/apps/br230836 - Selling apps
http://advertising.microsoft.com/windowsadvertising/developer – More about the Microsoft Advertising SDK

Windows 8 UI Experience

Touch first, less chrome, fast, fluid; these are just some of the descriptive words used to describe the Windows 8 look and feel. The interface is optimized for mobile form factors and designed to work with finger, mouse, or keyboard input giving users even more ways to interact with their PCs.

The start screen provides a new feature called Live Tiles that gives developers an interesting opportunity to get their app noticed. Live content can be displayed on the tile icon and keep the user updated as to what is new in your application at a glance.

There are even more exciting Window 8 UI features that offer developers opportunities to create compelling Windows 8 apps. Refer to these articles for more on Windows 8 UI features:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/05/18/creating-the-windows-8-user-experience.aspx - Creating the Windows 8 user experience
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh750302 - Windows Store app fundamentals

Windows 8 Runtime APIs

App Store For Windows 7 Free Download

New for Windows 8 is a set of APIs called the Windows Runtime. The Windows Runtime is a unified set of APIs that can be used in .Net languages, C++, and HTML/JavaScript equally. The Windows Runtime is similar to using the .NET APIs you may be familiar with , but they have been implemented with COM inC++ to allows use from languages other than .Net.. The major differences from traditional .NET APIs include the removal of many of the redundant, obsolete, and legacy APIs.

Porting

Now that you have decided to move your application to Windows 8, what is it going to take? The following sections describe some of the options and challenges in moving to Windows 8.

Touch

Adding touch support to your Windows 8 application is an important aspect of the porting process.

Let’s look at an example of what type of UI in your existing app would probably be ready for a touch-based interface and what would need some work. Here is a screen shot of a popular painting program:

Figure 1 - Main drawing page screen shot using Paint from Microsoft Windows 7*.

Highlighted in red are some of the immediately visible problem areas when thinking about how this application will work with touch.

The title and status bars at the top and bottom –Screen real-estate is at a premium on smaller form factors, the space taken up by these status bars is being wasted since the primary purpose of this application is to paint on the canvas.
The controls on the menu bar – These small icon controls will be hard to select if only using touch.
Color selection – The small icons are a problem along with more screen taken up for colors than anything else besides the canvas. A possible design consideration would be to think about how often a user switches colors, is this something that needs to always be available on the screen?

Let’s now take a look at what a similar application looks like using the Windows 8 Store UI. This is a similar painting program in two modes. The first figure shows the main canvas drawing part of the application. The second image shows what you see when the settings menu is brought up.

App Store On This Laptop

Figure 2 - Main canvas screen shot using Microsoft Fresh Paint from Windows 8*

Immediately visible is how the canvas is center stage. The only visible UI besides the canvas are the undo and redo arrows. The settings UI is not immediately visible, but using touch or even a mouse will bring up the menu. A right-click or using your finger to swipe up from the bottom brings up this menu and is shown below:

Figure 3 - Settings screen shot using Microsoft Fresh Paint from Windows 8*

All the same controls are there, you can change your brush, update the color, etc., but now the interface to do this is quite a bit easier if you are using touch. Comparing just the color selection UI, you can tell the buttons are laid out farther apart making it easier to select with just a fingertip. The indicator of what color is selected is also an interesting detail and calls out the color subtly. The status bars that are persistent in the Windows 7 version are there once the settings menu is brought up so nothing is lost.

Here are a couple of great articles for learning more specifics about what makes a good touch-enabled UI:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/cc872774.aspx - Touch
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh770552.aspx - Provides Windows 8 UI design guidance

Development

Now that we have looked at some ideas regarding the UI and touch considerations, we can look at how to create this new great looking application.

One nice feature of developing a Windows Store app is the amount of choices available for creating this new