Installed Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 RC in order to meed the requirements.

Opened our Modern-UI application project

Right clicked the solution and choose to Add Windows Phone 8.1

I was greeted with some weird popup that I didn't understand about projects under source code control and something about checking files in so I stopped. Went back and generated my own branch in case something bad happened or was an operation that happened on the TFS server.

10 minutes later I was back, branch created, and download to my machine.

I added the Windows Phone stuff again and confirmed the popups until VS did its thing.

Once complete, I ran the project to ensure things still compiled.

Ok, all is well. It should be since we really haven't done anything yet.

Time to move the assets to the shared solution.

Selected all folders and for some reason I could perform any clipboard operations.

Found out the Service Reference folder isn't an asset. Once that was deselected I was able to cut all the folders and past them into the shared solution.

Rebuild solution.

Oh boy, Houston, we have a problem.

Ok, these all appear to be Windows Phone issues, lets see what happens if we take that out of the build process.

Great, things compile and it appears everything in the RT app works fine.

Time to dig into the Windows Phone issues.

Caliburn.Micro - 3rd party tool... Ok, lets see if there's a nuget package for this... Yup, its a pre-release but i'll take it!

Callisto - 3rd party tool... Nope, nothing...

Windows.UI.Interactivity - 3rd party tool?... is this a Microsoft thing? Oh, nope, its just a clever name, and nope, no update.

More missing references, oh, its a .CS asset in the root of the Modern app's project, Cut that over to the shared solution and rebuild takes care of some more errors.

Whats next, oh, we're trying to talk to one of our web services, I wonder why that's an error, start poking around and I find its a Service Reference (the folder I couldn't cut from earlier) and in our Modern app we have references to two of our web services.

Search around online and determine that Service References are not available in the RC but should be available in the RTM.

So that's where we sit... 33 errors to go, all referencing web services so I submit all my changes to my shiny new branch and call it a day.

Wrapping up: Talking to one of our developers the next day it sounds like Service References could probably be wired up manually if we needed to. I'll wait until RTM and see how that process works through the UI.

My employer builds a mission critical line of business applications built on the Microsoft .NET platform. We've been using .NET since it was released and have had great success because of this. Although I’m not a developer I have access to the code base for various reasons.

I found my way into a position that was offered to me that I never knew existed (maybe more on that someday) and now I don’t want to do anything else. That reduced my ambitions to become an actual developer, but I do want to learn enough to make my life easier (through automation) and maybe publish a few apps someday.

Watching the ever changing technology roadmap and seeing how our company reacts is exciting, interesting, and fun. But sometimes scary, difficult, and not so fun. But sometimes I see innovation coming from Apple, Google, Microsoft (order by Name asc), and others, I get excited!

So sometimes I do little skunkworks projects on my own time. I’ll take our software and play with it in ways I think could be beneficial for us or our customers. This sometimes lets me nudge our company in a particular direction, while at the same time learning more about these technologies, gaining a better understanding from a business perspective, and what it takes to implement them.

Each of these exercises help me slowly grow my understanding of programming, while at the same time playing with technologies that truly excite me.

To follow are some of my experiences with them while playing with corporate code.