Microsoft developer tool helps port iOS apps to Windows Phone 7

Microsoft might have over 10,000 apps in the Windows Marketplace, but it’s got nothing on Apple’s 300,000 apps available on their App Store. So, in an effort to bring a wider app selection to WP7 users, Microsoft has announced the launch of a new service to help accelerate the catching up. Called iOS to Windows Phone 7 API mapping tool, it helps developers to bring their iOS apps over to the Windows Phone platform.

According to Jean-Christophe Cimetiere, Microsoft’s senior technical evangelist: “With this tool, iPhone developers can grab their apps, pick out the iOS API calls, and quickly look up the equivalent classes, methods and notification events in WP7…The code samples allow developers to quickly migrate short blobs of iOS code to the equivalent C# code. All WP7 API documentations are pulled in from the Silverlight, C# and XNA sources on MSDN.”

This means that iOS developers keen on bringing their apps over to WP7 won’t have to work so hard on the whole conversion process. If the most of the APIs they use in iOS have an equivalent in WP7, the iOS to Windows Phone 7 API mapping tool will greatly speed up the process. Microsoft will be adding more languages in the future, so we should expect and Android to WP7 tool soon. Find out more at the official Windows Phone blog.

 

George Wong
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: api, Apps, iOS, Microsoft, translate, Windows Phone 7