One of Microsoft’s problems in attracting people to write Windows Phone 7 applications is that the user base is much smaller than those of the iPhone or Android, so app developers tend to focus on those platforms. Now, Microsoft is trying to make it easier for people to take the apps they’ve developed for the iPhone and make them work on Windows Phone.
With the iPhone/iOS to Windows Phone 7 API (application programming interface) mapping tool, released on Friday, developers have a new online resource for doing this conversion.
Essentially, the API mapping tool works like a foreign-language dictionary, said Jean-Christophe Cimetiere, Microsoft senior technical evangelist for interoperability. Developers can go through the code of their iPhone app and find the equivalent API calls for a Windows Phone 7 app.
“For this first round we focused on identifying the one-to-one mapping when it exists,” Cimetiere wrote in a blog post. “In the following versions we’ll expand the scope and anytime the concepts are similar enough, we’ll do our best to provide the appropriate guidance.
“Of course, this is a work in progress, coverage will expand and more iOS APIs will be mapped soon.”
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