How much effort is required in order to port an application from Windows Phone 8 to Windows 8?
Ideally, I would like to develop ONE application which can be deployed to both Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. That seems unlikely, so instead I want the next best thing:
An approach to developing a Windows Phone 8 application that will make it as easy as possible to port the application to Windows 8.
Perhaps I can avoid certain namespaces, put certain compile conditions around certain sections etc. – I am hoping someone has the insight to list the things necessary to make it completely painless to port a Windows Phone 8 application to Windows 8.
It depends on the type of application you create for Windows Phone 8. Phone includes a very cut down version of WinRT with XAML which resembles Silverlight, not WinRT. It will be impossible to make one application and it run everywhere.
The best plan of action you can take is abstract as much as possible to portable class libraries. Plan on at least doing a major duplication of effort on your XAML code though because of the conflicting syntax