MAT v4.0 Technical Preview Update 4 is available.

The Multilingual App Toolkit v4.0 TP Update 4 (v4.0.1331.0*) is available.  This update delivers new features as well as several key bug fixes for Windows and Xamarin based projects.

Export filtering by state support
This update includes a key new feature that allows you to control what resource are exported for translations.  Until now, every export included all resources, regardless of the translation or localizability state.  This created the possibility for translator to inadvertently change resources that were already fully translated.  Combining this new feature with the several import fixes reported by customers makes this a great additional the MAT’s localization workflow.

Export by State

Export, Import and Recycling support for XLIFF 2.0
The XLIFF 2.0 is the latest approved standard by the OASIS membership.  This release marks MAT’s initial support for XLIFF 2.0 via exports, imports and recycling.  Supporting XLIFF 1.2 and 2.0 provides greater flexibility when working with translation services and professionals. 

Jan Nelson announced MAT’s initial XLIFF 2.0 support at the Riga Summit 2015 and Kevin O’Donnell recently demonstrated Microsoft’s internal use of XLIFF 2.0 at LocWorld in Berlin, Germany.  This week also marks the official announcement of Microsoft’s intention to release the .NET based XLIFF 2.0 Object Model as open source.  We are pretty excited about the XLIFF 2.0 OM effort!

Export XLIFF 2.0

Improved project management of resource file
Redesigning the core operational architecture of MAT has been a huge undertaking, but is paying off in our ability to support multiple project types and cross-platform projects.  Making strategic decisions regarding ‘must have’ and ‘future support’ are critical to shipping any product and MAT is no exception to this reality.  One such trade-off is the level of project management support for added new resource files after adding MAT managed language files. 

The decision was to target the single resource file experiences initially.  Since most modern app models favor use a single resource file, this allowed us to focus on delivering the core workflow experience for many projects while enabling support for Xamarin based cross-platform efforts. 

Unfortunately this meant that WinForms and ASP.Net customers needed to apply the largest number of workarounds as every new form creates a new RESX file.  The improvements in the project management in this release will allow seamless addition of new resource files in your project.  While we have more project management work items in our backlog, this release provides support for dynamically adding new resource files to your project after MAT managed language have been added.

As always, the list of key fixes are listed on the v4.0 Technical Preview article on our user voice site.  Please refer to https://aka.ms/matpreview for additional details and download links.  If you already have MAT v4.0 installed, watch for the notice to install the update.

* We did a quick update as the XLIFF 2.0 OM in 4.0.1330.0 was not the right version.  XLIFF 2.0 functionality is working as planned with 4.0.1331.0.

Thank you,
The Multilingual App Toolkit team
multilingual@microsoft.com
User voice site: https://aka.ms/matvoice
v4.0 Technical Preview: https://aka.ms/matpreview