Most of us have often struggled and hacked our code to implement an assembly that we could use in different .NET target platforms. Portable libraries are here to help us to do exactly this.
Now there is an easy way to develop a portable assembly that works without modification in .NET Framework, Windows Store apps style, Silverlight, Windows Phone, and XBOX 360 applications.
The trick is that the Portable Class Library project supports a subset of assemblies from these platforms, providing us a Visual Studio template.
This recipe will show you how to implement a basic application and help you get familiar with Visual Studio 2012.
In order to use this recipe you should have Visual Studio 2012 installed. Note that you will need a Visual Studio 2012 SKU higher than Visual Studio Express for it to fully support portable library projects.