Kona, Kona, Kona! [Think P&P dev guidance for composite application WinStore Apps {Yes, like Prism, but not}]

Infragistics - Introducing Kona Guidance for Windows 8 Application Development (Think of it as Prism for Windows 8, but not really)

I am extremely excited to announce a new project from the smart people at Microsoft’s Patterns & Practices team called Kona.  What is Kona you ask?  Kona is the new developer guidance for developing line of business applications for Windows 8.  Initially this project was called Prism for WinRT, but as it turns out, it’s really not Prism running on Windows 8, but rather a new set of guidance for developing Windows 8 applications.

Wait… just... a... minute Brian.  What do you mean it’s not “Prism” running on Windows 8?  What do you mean “new guidance”?  Well, if you download Kona and expect to start adding regions and modules like you’re used to, then you might get a bit frustrated looking for the attached properties and IModule interface.  Why?  Well, because it’s not there!  Actually there is a lot of Prism code that you are used to having that is not there and will not be there.  Why do you ask?  The answer is simple; it’s Windows 8.  Huh!?  It’s a new platform, and it has changed significantly compared to WPF and Silverlight.  When they were looking at doing the “port” of Prism, they soon realized that a lot of capabilities just didn’t make sense to bring over to the new platform.  Hence, a new set of guidance using a new set of APIs that are specific to the new Windows 8 platform.

Now not everything was ditched.  Some things, not a lot, made sense to bring over.  DelegateCommand and DelegateCommand<T> is still there.  Guidance on MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) is still there, but honestly I don’t agree with the implementation.  Keep in mind, this is the first initial drop of Kona, so we can always make improvements to the code base.  Everything is a learning experience.

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Interesting. Brian's post is much more complete that you'll find yet on the codeplex page, http://konaguidance.codeplex.com/, but as he said, this is just the first drop... Will be watching for this now though... :)