VS2013 RC: Portable Class Libraries Target Frameworks

In this post we are going to discuss the changes in target framework selections in Visual Studio 2013 RC. Up until, Visual Studio 2012, Visual Studio has supported the following framework selections:

1. .Net framework 4.0, 4.0.3 & 4.5
2. Silverlight 4 & 5
3. Windows Phone 7.x & 8.0
4. Windows Store Apps
5. Xbox 360

With Visual Studio 2013 RC, now Portable Class Libraries can also support targeting .net framework 4.5.1 and Windows Store Apps (Windows 8.1). But Visual Studio 2013 has mainly reduced other target frameworks for PCL. The following is the list of frameworks which are not supported in Visual Studio 2013 for PCL development.

1. Silverlight 4
2. Windows Phone 7.x
3. Xbox 360

Supported Framework Xml Changes
In order to support a combination of target frameworks for PCLs, Visual Studio keeps a list of xml documents in Supported framework folders for each profile. Actually, a profile is selected based on target framework selection matching the profile.



Now we can develop PCLs in three different versions of Visual Studio. They are Visual Studio 2010 SP1, 2012 and 2013 RC. It appears that in order to limit target frameworks for PCL development in Visual Studio 2013 RC there are some changes in the Xml schema for these documents. Let's see the document for Silverlight 4 in Profile44 in Visual Studio 2012.


Visual Studio 2013 has added a few new attributes. They are FamilyName, MinimumVisualStudioVersion and MaximumVisualStudioVersion. We must remember that the version of Visual Studio 2012 and 2013 RC are 11.x and 12.x respectivly.


The above is the Xml document for Silverlight 4 in the Supported Framework folder in the same profile after the installation of Visual Studio 2013 RC. We can notice that the maximum version for the framework is "11.0", so the framework is not supported in Visual Studio 2013 RC. Below is the framework xml for Windows Store apps (Windows 8.1) in \v4.6\Profile\Profile44\SupportedFrameworks folder. From the xml document, we can clearly figure out that this profile can only be used for a Visual Studio version 2013 RC at minimum.


Converting Project for Unsupported Frameworks
Opening a PCL project in Visual Studio can convert the target frameworks to one of the supported frameworks. A Silverlight4 project is converted to Silverlight5 project.



We can opt to not migrate the project to a new framework version but we wouldn't be able to work on it in Visual Studio 2013 RC then. The project is shown in Solution Explorer as follows:



There seems to be a bug in the current version, which shows the following error message if we don't opt to convert, by not checking the check box. It is shown as follows: