The Mobilize.Net Silverlight Bridge has been released for general availability. The tool significantly reduces the work involved to transform Windows Silverlight Phone 8.x code to the new Universal Windows Platform (UWP) and is offered as a free add-on for Visual Studio.
The Silverlight Bridge automates a big part of the conversion process from Windows Phone 8.x code to UWP. As an extension to Visual Studio, the tool takes as input of existing projects for both application code and class libraries then outputs a new UWP project, converting C# and XAML files to the new UWP platform.
Mobilize.Net reports that with 2300 initial mappings the solution handles about 80% of the API frequency found in existing Silverlight Phone apps in the Windows Store. The project is also available in GitHub to help encourage publishers to develop around the solution and increase the available coverage.
The tool works to parse and analyze the source code of an app and convert references to Universal Windows Platform. The platform provides native C# code with no runtimes and offers the following benefits:
- Convert Windows Silverlight Phone 8.1 apps to Windows 10 apps.
- Migrate workloads in 1/3 the time, 1/3 the normal cost.
- Enables the top 80% of apps to be converted 80% of the way.
- Includes mappings for top APIs and components.
- Supports open source extensibility model - anyone can contribute mapping
Using the Silverlight Bridge requires latest major Windows Update for both Phone and Desktop.