My company is developing corporate Windows 8.1 apps for use within the organisation. Although we are only targeting Windows 8.1, we are interested in developing our apps with a view to eventually target Android and/or iOS by using Xamarin.
So, we want to develop using PCLs that are compatible with Xamarin, but we haven't licenced it yet, since we're not ready. Can we simply install the PCL profiles for Xamarin so we can at least be assured that our classes will be compatible, if and when we are ready?
The profiles are not xamarin profiles - they are .net profiles which xamarin support.
The profiles are installed as part of visual studio 2013 - or can be installed as extensions to visual studio 2012.
If you select WindowsPhone Silverlight 8.0, .net 4.5 and Windows Store apps then this will allow you to build a profile 78 pcl library - which is one of the profiles xamarin support - and is a pretty good choice for modern development...