Multilingual App Toolkit v2.1 service release

Welcome to the first Multilingual App Toolkit official blog!  It seemed only fitting that the first blog is about a service release to improve the toolkit itself…

Today we released an update for the Multilingual App Toolkit v2.1 that addresses community reported issues.

One key issue addresses the loss of additional language support when retargeting a JavaScript app from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1.  Even though the localized resources are added to the app’s PRI file, the manifest language list was not updated. This prevented access to the additional app languages when testing and publishing to the store.  After applying this update the workaround of adding the languages manually to the manifest will no longer be required.

Another fix in this release enables support for blank resources.  Prior to this release resources that were empty (“”) or only contained spaces (“    “) would cause a build error. With this release, blank resources are processed correctly.

We also took this opportunity to implement some performance tuning around translation suggestions.  We worked with the Microsoft Terminology API team to tune our calls to their service.  We also enhanced the editor suggestion experience by calling all the providers in parallel to improve the overall suggestion performance.

Additional fixes include editor changes to better support with Pinyin input and corrected translations in the Editor UI.

Developers using the Multilingual App Toolkit will receive an update notification via Visual Studio.  If you don’t want to wait for the notification, you can download it directly from the MSDN download pages today: https://msdn.microsoft.com/windows/apps/bg127574

With this release, the MAT team is pleased to announce the launch of the Multilingual App Toolkit feedback site https://multilingualapptoolkit.uservoice.com.  This is similar to Visual Studio (https://visualstudio.uservoice.com) and Windows Phone Developer platform (https://wpdev.uservoice.com) feedback and voting sites.  We are looking forward to the same level of success.

Our goal with the feedback site is to provide a common location for feature suggestions as well as community voting on the recommended features.  While we can’t promise to implement every feature, we are very interested in learning what features will benefit the developer community when deliver Windows platform apps to the global market.

Thank you,

The Multilingual App Toolkit team