Okra App Framework for Windows Phone 8.1 Released

Okra App Framework v1.1

I’m pleased to announce that version 1.1 of the Okra App Framework has been released. For Windows 8.1 development there is not much new to report - the same great MVVM framework designed with Windows apps in mind. The big news however is the official release of Windows Phone 8.1 support - it has been a couple of months since the beta release and I’ve no bug reports so here it is.

In summary the new NuGet packages include,

• Windows 8.1 support - Create a new project using the Visual Studio templates and start using the MVVM pattern straight away.
• Windows Phone 8.1 support - Simply add a new Windows Phone 8.1 project and reference the NuGet package. The programming model is the same as for Windows 8.1, and most of your code should be sharable between projects.
• Portable Class Library support - In addition, a PCL version is included. This allows sharing of logic and view-models in a single portable binary between Windows and Windows Phone projects.

You can get the Okra App Framework now by installing the Visual Studio extension, from NuGet or via GitHub. Full details on how to download the framework are available here.

Windows 10, Android and iOS

In other news, Windows 10 support has now been merged into the master branch of the framework. Unfortunately NuGet currently does not have platform support for Windows 10, so this is not available via the NuGet packages. If you wish to experiment with the latest bits you can download and build the source code from the Okra.Core project on GitHub.

Additionally, many thanks go to Joel Fjordén who has made a start on Android and iOS support via Xamarin.Forms. This is only the start, but if you want to experiment with cross-platform development then there are specific NuGet packages on the Okra pre-release feed at https://www.myget.org/F/okra/ (add this in the NuGet settings and make sure you have prerelease packages enabled).