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Announcing Multilingual App Toolkit v3.1

  • Articolo

Today we released the Multilingual App Toolkit v3.1. This release provides several key fixes as well as new and improved features.  Please note that due to updates to the setup process, you will need to perform a one time uninstall of MAT v3.0 or earlier before installing v3.1.

Visual Studio Online builds
clip_image001While the Multilingual App Toolkit has supported local TFS builds for some time, building online was not available. The team took up the challenge to not only support v3.1 for online builds, but to enabled MAT v2.2 or greater as well. If you have an existing MAT v2.2 or greater project using Visual Studio Online, you can simply enable online builds and it will just work. For more information on Visual Studio Online builds, please see: https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/what-is-visual-studio-online-vs

Expanded import, export and recycling
Round-tripping of resources with friends, family and professional translators has been supported since the first release of MAT. Soon thereafter, a recycling option was added so you could ‘import’ translations from other unrelated projects (or share between universal apps) without the need to send out similar resources for translation for a second (or third or fourth) time. In this release, we have merged the Import and Recycling options into the same user interface to save you some steps.

One of the more common requests has been to extend this model to support CSV files as well. I’m happy to announce that CSV files are now supported. The export steps are the same as in previous releases, except for a new drop down that allows you to choose between .XLF and .CSV output formats.

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Importing provides the ability to import multiple files from multiple locations. Be sure to select the “Enable resource recycling” option if you are importing non-related projects. We’ll dive deeper into the Exporting, Importing and Recycling features in a future blog.

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Improved translation and suggestion results
In previous versions the translation providers would return a confidence level of either 50% or 100%. This did not provide for any automatic differentiation between results based on case or punctuation differences. This made it difficult to easily select the ‘best’ suggestion as it was not guaranteed to be the top option.

To help simplify picking the best recommended translation, the provider model and each provider differentiates by tuning the confidence level value. This ensures the preferred recommendation is always at the top of the suggestion list as well as the result you get when you select Translate All (or Generate Translations inside Visual Studio).

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And of course, no release is complete without addressing those little critters that sometimes make it into the product. Here is a list of the key fixes.

  • Enabled Windows 7 + Visual Studio 2013 installation support. To be honest, this was just an embarrassing miss for v3.0
  • Improved and added support for Visual Studio Express, including Windows, Desktop and Web editions
  • Removed dependencies on the Visual Studio .config files to avoid future issues (see: Rename is disabled in Visual Studio with MAT)
  • Incorporated fix to ensure that the Store always showed the full list of the app’s languages (See: Store is not showing my languages)
  • Added better validation of translation result to prevent invalid XLIFF results
  • Fixed build failure if “####” was in the source or target resource string
  • Fixed offline first run issues with the language portal provider
  • Fixed support for Windows Phone (Sliverlight) projects in Visual Studio 2013 Express for Windows
  • Fixed support for Class Libraries, Windows Runtime components, as well as improved support for other project types
  • Added Microsoft Translation provider support for language neutral codes (ja, fr, it, etc)
  • Fixed loss of existing translation from first RESX in the project when converting from RESX to XLF files

The team really focused on key features as well as addressing both reported and non-reported issues in this release. We are pretty excited about the features as well as the overall level of product improvement in v3.1. We hope you will enjoy the features and fixes in this release of the Multilingual App Toolkit.

Thank you,
The Multilingual App Toolkit team
multilingual@microsoft.com
User voice site: https://aka.ms/matvoice

Comments

  • Anonymous
    June 26, 2014
    The title of the download page is still "Multilingual App Toolkit 2.0".

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2014
    Kinnara, Thanks for pointing this out.  It is being fixed.

  • Anonymous
    July 21, 2014
    Trying to use MAT with an ASP.NET MVC project in Visual Studio 2013 update 3 but having some issues. For example, does my configuration support resjson files? I created a folder MultiLingualResources but have not been able to enable MAT as it is looking for a resource file. Where should the resource file go? Is this a resjson file or a standard resource file?

  • Anonymous
    July 21, 2014
    Should have mentioned I am using Windows 7

  • Anonymous
    July 22, 2014
    The current ASP.NET MVC support is limited to resx files.  I have had a chance to test MAT with Update 3 yet, but it should work the same as update 2. Using Windows 7 is supported and should not be a factor.

  • Anonymous
    July 23, 2014
    Cameron,  What versions of VS does Multilingual Tool kit work with?

  • Anonymous
    July 24, 2014
    MAT supports Visual Studio 2012 and 2013 - including the express editions - with v3.1.  However we focus the majority of our testing on Visual Studio 2013 environments.

  • Anonymous
    August 06, 2014
    I have MAT working fine with the MultilngualResources folder in an ASP.NET MVC project. Really nice! I have tried to move the MultilngualResources folder into a support dll where data manipulation is done for WebAPI to be able to translate some data values. The English text is being correctly supplied to the ASP.NET Razor page generation but the other languages are not being accessed when the CurrentUICulture is changed to the desired culture. Any ideas? Thanks

  • Anonymous
    August 11, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 11, 2014
    @Gyle Iverson, can you send the file to multilingual at Microsoft dot com so I can take a look.  This sounds like a conversion to XLIFF issue.

  • Anonymous
    August 11, 2014
    Just sent you the file. Thanks for helping.

  • Anonymous
    August 25, 2014
    Hi, I am running into issues with the MAT, it seems to prevent the "Refresh Windows App" feature of Visual Studio from working. I have posted on the MS forums with further explanations, I would appreciate if you could take a look: social.msdn.microsoft.com/.../visual-studio-keeps-asking-me-to-restart-my-application-even-if-i-didnt-make-any-change Thank you! Fabien

  • Anonymous
    February 10, 2016
    I have MAT 3.1.1250.0 installed, but it does not work in Visual Studio Online builds. I receive the following error: C:Program Files (x86)MSBuildMicrosoftMultilingual App Toolkitv3.0Microsoft.Multilingual.PriResources.targets(43,5): Error : Cannot start process because a file name has not been provided.