Guidance on how to move your Windows Phone 7 applications to Windows Phone 8

Earlier this spring, I had the pleasure to present that the Finnish Windows 8 Metro application developer events, titled "Geeks on Slates". One of the reoccurring questions then was, "how do I move my Windows Phone 7 application to Windows 8 Metro"?

At that point, we could only guess how things would appear on the final version of Visual Studio 2012 or Windows 8, but now that we are at Release Candidate/Preview stage, it's pretty safe to say that the broad lines will not change.

On MSDN, there's now a newly written page on this topic, which I suggest you to read. It is titled "Migrate/port a Windows Phone 7 app to a Metro style app". The title says it pretty much all: you cannot directly convert your phone application to a Metro application with any Visual Studio wizard; it's a more manual process.