MAT 4.0 Beta Update 3 have been published
MAT v4.0.1517.0 contains fixes based on reported customer issues.
This release is a service based release and as such does not contain any new features. For a complete list of the changes in this as well as previous updates, please see the change log on our User Voice site: Here is a direct link: https://multilingualapptoolkit.uservoice.com/knowledgebase/articles/460620
Moving forward:
Two big work items that the team has been focused on is v3.1 –> v4.0 project upgrade and Shared Project support. We consider this critical work that must be completed before we can declare v4.0 RTW. (And have received lots of feedback supporting this belief!)
Project upgrade:
Automatically upgrade of v3.1 to v4.0 project has been a pretty significant undertaking. Depending on the project type, the XLF and resource file structures needs to recreated and in all cases the XLF file contents need to be remapped to the new design – all this without losing your translations. A lot of work and focus has been placed on ensuing the this goes smoothly as well as ensuing that if something expected happens, you can recovered from your source control or the backup folder. Needless to same, we need to get this right.
Shared Project support
Shared project support is another area that been highly requested. Since a shared project does not work the same as other projects, supporting them has required many late hours to incorporate then in the toolkit’s workflow. Updating the design to support adding and managing resources on the shared project resulted in going back to the whiteboard more than once.
Dropping support for Visual studio 2012
Share project support is not available for VS 2012. As such, we need to move to the VS 2013 SDK to enable shared projects. We expect the impact of this move to be minimal, but we do know that some will be effected. However, this is unavoidable as we need to support Windows 8.1 Shared Project and Windows 10 projects correctly.
Help us get to RTW
While MAT v4.0 is still in beta, the adoption rate is climbing rapidly and is often used in production environments. As such, we are looking for developers willing to install private drops of that contain both the v3.1-> 4.0 project upgrade and share project support on your existing projects. Given the scope and project types that MAT supports, this will provide us with critical feedback to ensure the RTW release is rock solid.
I will publish the private drop location via this blog (and twitter) in the near future. However, if you want to receive direct communication from me, please send an email or twitter message with #MATDROPS and I’ll be sure to send you the direct link this week.
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
Twitter: @CameronLerum