Microsoft UK recently ran the UK Future Decoded Event where I was the owner of a half-day track of sessions on Visual Studio for Cross Platform Applications. I described that track as;

There’s a tension between an app developer who wants to get the most from their investment in skills and tools and a device/platform vendor who wants to make sure that apps are really shiny on their devices.

What’s a dev to do? Build native for iOS/Android/Windows and take the hit on multiple code-bases? Go lowest, common denominator and build hybrid? Or…is there another way? Join us for an afternoon of getting bang up to date on how Visual Studio works with Xamarin and Cordova to get your code across as many devices as possible without compromising the user or developer experience.

The second session of the day was presented by me and was entitled “Visual Studio & Windows/Phone: Native C# Apps on Microsoft devices” and the video is now available for you to watch below.

In short, the session is intended to cover off a few areas;

• A brief scene setting around cross platform C# code writing across iOS/Android/Windows/Phone
• Where Windows/Phone have got to with the 8.1 release and the converged platform for “Universal” apps
• An explanation of what shared projects are in Visual Studio, how the tooling works with them and how we can code shared/exclusive code for multiple platforms this way
• A demo of building a simple Windows/Phone “app” with a lot of shared pieces.
• A demo of looking at how shared projects and portable class libraries can allow us to share/exclude cross-platform code across Android/Windows/Phone/iOS.

Most of the session is demo (I’d guess around 45 of the 60 minutes is in Visual Studio).

Enjoy!