What are Portable Class Libraries?

The whole point of creating a class library project is reusability. Now we want this reusability not only within a .NET application, not across .NET applications, but across different types of .NET applications. Now different types of .NET applications means WPF, Windows, Silverlight, Windows phone, etc.

Now each one of these applications run on different platforms and have different flavors of .NET Frameworks. For example, Silverlight application runs inside a browser and has a downsized version of .NET.

So in a Silverlight application, if you try to reference a simple “Class project”, you would end up with the below error. That’s where portable class libraries are useful. By creating a portable class, we can reference it in any kind of .NET project types.

To create a portable class, we need to use the portable class template which is available in Visual Studio as shown in the below figure:

Below is a simple youtube video which demonstrates what is a Portable Class library in C#.

CodeProject

For further reading do watch the below interview preparation videos and step by step video series.

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