run Windows 8.1 app inside Windows 10 preview - windows

When I run my Windows 8.1 app inside Windows 10 preview (build 10240 and also all prior versions) all controls are quite tiny.
Normally the screen has 1366x768 physical pixels (and a scaling factor of 1.0 was reported).
When running the Windows 8.1 app inside Windows 10, a logical resolution of 1645.783... x 925.301... is reported (and still a scaling factor of 1.0 is reported).
Windows 10 then seems to downscale the 1645.783... x 925.301 "pixels" to the 1366x768 physical pixels which leads in notably smaller controls (while more content is shown)
The "magic factor" is 1.2048... which is exactly 1.0 / 0.83.
I know that Windows 10 has new scaling plateus. But this all does not make sense at all. The artificial scaling has an akward factor. Actually, leaving 1366x768 (#1.0) would be perfect. I consider this as a serious bug.
What is Windows 10 doing?
(I could port my Win 8.1 app to Win 10 so that the scaling would be OK again, but I would like to wait some months till the tools are really ready)

In Windows 10 display scaling affects both desktop apps and Windows apps. In Windows 8 however, display scaling only affected desktop apps. Your issue might be linked to this. Check your display scaling in Settings > System > Display > "Change the size of text, apps and other items".

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How to "disable" HD screens for Windows Phone app Store?

When I started working on our company's Windows Phone app project there was no full HD resolution for WP. But now there is and I'm supposed to disable the app for full HD devices in the WP Store. How do I exactly do that?
The main reason for this is that the app has a thick black ribbon on top of the screen when used with a full HD device.
I have noticed that when you update or upload .xap file, the Store recognizes the requirements of the app. The Store says the app works on all screens. How do I set the requirements so that the app is disabled HD resolution screens?
The app is made to support WP versions 7.1 through 8. I eyed the Internet for help but it seems that because the app is WP 7 compatible I can't describe the resolutions in the WMAppManifest where the Store would easily to find it. Or can I?
It would be so great if I could do this some easy way instead of going through the whole app to make it work "better" on HD screens.
There is no way how you can prevent users with certain display resolutions from installing your app. A similar question was asked here, it was about installation prevention of apps for specific device types. What you can do is to do the check in code.
You could check the device's display resolution when starting the application. If the size exceeds your limit, you could inform the user about that and exit the application.
How can I get a screen resolution of Device (Windows Phone)
However, I don't know how this would affect the app certification.
Windows Phone 7.1 only supports 800 x 480 resolution and Windows Phone 8 supports multiple resolution.
The scaling used for Windows Phone 7x apps on Windows Phone 8 means that one 720p and 1080p devices, you will get a black band. There is nothing you can do.
You could recompile the app as Windows Phone 8 app and have both WP7x and WP8 xaps available and this will ensure that the space is consumed correctly and the black band isn't shown.

top margin issue for windows phone 7 apps on windows phone 8

The windows phone 7 application which I developed using 7.1 SDK occupies the entire screen on wp7. But the same application when opened in Windows Phone 8 shows some extra margin on top because of which my app was not able use the space on top. Any idea how to fix this?
WP7 only supports only one resolution (480x800).
For 480x800 WP8 devices that's obviously fine.
For 1280x768 devices this scales fine as this is the same aspect ratio.
However 1280x720 devices have a different aspect ratio which leaves the black bars at the top of the screen.
The only way to fix this is to upgrade your project to WP8 using the WP8 SDK (whilst watching out for any subtle issues that may bring).

Windows Phone 8 resolution fix

When im testing WP7.1 application on HTC 8x it has some "blank" space in system tray area. I know that its because of new resolutions, but how to fix that?
Just upgrade your project to Windows Phone 8 and recompile it. If you haven't hard-coded sizes in pixels in your layout, it should automatically fill the extra space.

Jerky Silverlight 4 animations when running app in OOB

I was playing with new Silverlight 4 and to my surprise when I run my sample application in OOB all animations become very jerky when I moved mouse around during animations, but when I run my app in browser animations are smooth even when moving mouse around.
I tried my app on two different computers, turned on GPU acceleration in OOB settings - and got the same jerky result.
Is this a know problem with Silverlight?
I'm running WinXP SP3
UPDATE: Tested on 3 Windows 7 machines - no issues at all (running in OOB and in browser), tested additional 5 WinXP SP3 machines - 100% reproducible problem on any Silverlight 4 app running in OOB
Turning on "Enable GPU acceleration in Out of Browser" isn't enough. That setting works in tandem with .CacheMode property, which must be set on all elements (or a top-level element) whose rendered bitmap will be sent to the GPU.
From there, the GPU can hardware accelerate rotations, scalings, opacities, clipping. If your animation does any of that, you'll need to set element.CacheMode = "BitmapCache" on the top level element you are animating.
Again, you'll need to turn on the "enable GPU acceleration" for this to work.
If either step is missing, you won't get GPU accelerated.
A couple of caveats for hardware acceleration:
Pixel shaders and perspective transforms are not HW accelerated last I checked.
HW acceleration works on XP, but requires that you have a video card from NVidia, ATI, or Intel, and the driver date must be post Nov 2004. Anything less and nothing will be accelerated.
I recommend reading MSDN's article on hardware acceleration.

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