Windows 8 is a bit of a split personality , with the architecture shown below:

The left side is the new Metropolis / WinRT architecture, and the right side is the old Win32 / .NET architecture. it has been widely reported that ARM tablets will only support Metro / WinRT architecture. There was no indication that the ARM devices would require different code, and this seems very unlikely, given that it will have the same architecture.
Also, how easy would it be to port applications from Windows Phone metro to Windows 8 metro? Can we hope that no code change will ever be possible?
Itβs a little easier to port WP7 applications to Win8 because of the similarity of their architecture, i.e. the similar application life cycle and the similar limited set of APIs. However, of course, code changes are required, see this article for a simple cross-platform Win8-WinRT / Silverlight application . XAML interface elements are located in different namespaces, which affects all of your user interface code, the syntax of the XAML namespace mapping is different, so you cannot use XAML. This is really a mess.
Rumor has it that WP8 will use the same WinRT architecture , which will enable code sharing. However, I think this is unlikely, Microsoft has already made significant architectural changes from WP6.5 to WP7, doing it again to push developers away.
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