Using this knowledge I adapted DevicePairConnectionHelper once again, so now it’s not only cross platform, but it can also connect between Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8.1. I seem to have a thing with Italians these days – I had a lot of fun with a bunch of them at the Summit, and it was not until this Italian developer called Andrea Boschin pointed me to a recent blog post by him that I found a way out of this. I don’t doubt that it will work for tap+send, but as the majority of the current Windows 8.x devices (including Microsoft’s own excellent Surface devices) do not include NFC capabilities, the chances of making a successful connection between a Windows Phone and a random Windows 8 computer using tap+send are very small. That way, my friends, lay only mud pies and frustration.
Unfortunately the MSDN PixPresenter sample suggest you can connect between Windows Phone and Windows 8 by sharing app ids in the PeerFinder.AlternateIdentities property, and so does the MSDN documentation on said property. On my way to the November 2013 MVP Summit, at Matthijs Hoekstra’s house in Sammamish, and back again in the Netherlands I spent considerable time trying to get my tap+send and Bluetooth connection helper to not only work on Windows 8.1 as well, but also to make it provide cross-platform communication between Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8.1.
