It seems like a pretty cool idea: take the app you wrote for iOS, make a few minor changes, rebuild and upload to the Windows Store. The problem though is that it keeps Windows on phones as a second class citizen. Why should I invest in developing applications that take advantage of the strengths of the Windows platform if all I have to do is recompile for the crappy iOS platform to get there?

Why not do it the other way? Why not provide tools that make it easy for me to write my applications on Windows first and then retarget to iOS and Android? Make XAML and the other parts of the .NET framework work on iOS and Android so the task of retargeting is easy?

I’ve not actually looked at the toolkit yet, but I also have a feeling that there is a lot more involved in retargeting an iOS application to Windows than just hitting F5 in Visual Studio. Guess I’ll have to go see for myself though. But I still think it is backward to Microsoft’s long term interests.