I have been asked to look into the feasibility of porting an application that runs on Windows 7 & 8 to work on Window 8 phones and tablets. Our current application is mostly a service and I do not even know if you can have these on phones and tablets.

Anyway I spent some time googling trying to get the basics of what you can and can not do in these environments. For example, are they sandboxed like Android and iOS devices? Can you run a program continuously, like a service? etc...

Is there some start page that explains all the details to a potential developer that someone can point me too? I just keep finding stuff on MS site that asks me to download and install a development environment without explaining the basics first.