In our previous article we have see an approach to upgrade our existing project from the older version to the new Windows Phone 8 application project target. In this tutorial we will see an alternate approach to achieve the same by upgrading the project Windows Phone 7.1 project to Windows Phone 8.0. The approach is straight forward by simply changing the target from the Windows Phone 7.1 to Windows Phone 8.0 instead of making a direct upgrade.  [more]

Let us see how we can achieve this task in Windows Phone development, Open a Visual Studio 2012 IDE and open the project which is targeting the Windows Phone 7.1 OS version that was developed in Visual Studio 2010 IDE as shown in the screen below.

Right Click on the project name and select Properties which will open the property window with the default properties which was configured while the application was developed initially as shown in the screen below.

Clicking on properties shows the below screen where we can see the Windows Phone Application targeting the Windows Phone 7.1 OS and have option to select the other OS that is available which is Windows Phone 8.0 as shown in the screen below.

Select Windows Phone OS 8.0 and now the application will target the latest OS and have the features that are accessible for the Windows Phone SDK that can used effectively in the application. Selecting the Windows Phone OS 8.0 option will show a pop up window with a final confirmation and the information to take the backup of the existing version before it upgrades as shown in the screen below.

Clicking on Yes will start upgrading your application to the Windows Phone 8.0 version and all the necessary files and folder will be upgraded and changed that are required to run with Windows Phone 8.0 OS. Now go back to the Properties and we can see only the Windows Phone 8.0 OS option will be available as we cant downgrade to the previous version as shown in the screen below.