How to add C++/CX library to Windows Store solution targetting Any CPU

Question

So I have a Windows Store app using C# targeting Any CPU so that the single app will run on any Windows 8 x86/x64 desktop/tablet or ARM tablet. I need to add some special code in C++ which doesn't seemto have the option to target Any CPU. The code will compile and run both on x86/x64 and if I change the entire solution to ARM it will compile and run there too. So I'm looking for a way to make the C++ target Any CPU which I think is probably impossible. Or have the C++ library compiled multiple times (x86, x64 and ARM) and have all of them included in the appx package. I have spent about 3 hours reading Windows Store development docs on C++/CX and haven't found any way to do this yet. Of course I'll keep looking, but I'm hoping someone else has seen how to do this and can point me in the right direction.

Answer 1

There's no way you can create a single package targetting AnyCPU when you're calling into a native library. You need to create three different packages, one for each target architecture. When you're uploading the app to the store, you can include all three packages.

To simplify the process of building all three packages, you could create a Visual Studio extension (vsix) with all three builds of your native library. In this case the native library for the right platform will be automatically included in each package. Here's a quick tutorial on how to do it.