MAT v4.0 Technical Preview Update 1 with Xamarin support

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The Multilingual App Toolkit v4.0 Technical Preview Update 1 is available as of this morning.  The release continues to support Xamarin (Initial Announcement), bringing MAT’s streamlined localization workflow and services to Windows, iOS and Android platforms.

This update contains fixes as well as suggestions sent by early adopter both via email to multilingual@microsoft.com and MAT’s user voice site. We love hearing your feedback so THANK YOU and please keep it coming.

One visible change is in the ‘Add translation languages…’ dialog.  Previously Hindi (and other languages) were only selectable by the language and region code (hi-IN in this example).  As you can see in the image below, Hindi is now selectable at the root language level as well.  This enables easy selection for platforms that don’t support region, or if you are just targeting the root language in your app.

image

To support this change, the translation providers where enhanced to work with the root language as well.  In this example, if you select Hindi (‘HI’), the translation providers will ask the related service for hi-IN based translations.  This small change allows the continued use of the translation services when selecting a root language by mapping that root language to the specific language.  In most cases this mapping will provide the desired results.  This is configurable in case you want to change the mapping, but that’s the content for another blog.

The list of major fixes are listed via the v4.0 Technical Preview article on the MAT user voice site.  Please refer to https://aka.ms/matpreview for additional details and download links.  Of course, if you already have MAT v4.0 installed, Visual Studio will let you know to install the update.

Cameron
@CameronLerum
multilingual@microsoft.com
User voice site: https://aka.ms/matvoice