Common Usages for Portable Class Libraries
Portable libraries are useful if you don't need features that are specific to a certain platform or device, so they're very useful if you need to expose math calculations, isolated storage access, network access, data elaborations with regular expressions, and so on. Portable class libraries are also pattern-oriented, since they're perfect to expose data with the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern. In fact, the .NET Portable Subset contains all the classes and interfaces required by this famous pattern, so you can also bind views in WPF, Silverlight, Windows Phone, and Windows Store apps to ViewModels that such libraries expose. For this reason, in this article I'll describe an example based on the MVVM pattern and show how the same library and the same data can be shared across four different platforms.