Multilingual Toolkit does not work?

After looking at my download stats last week, I decided to upgrade all my WP7 apps to WP8 and continue developing from the there. The stats should that it was no longer worth the effort of maintaining a WP7 version of the code. The existing programs would remain in the marketplace, but not be updated.

For most of my apps, the upgrade went fine, but one app seemed to have an issue with being multilingual. (If I was going to upgrade my apps, I might as well give the users a bit more than a WP8 version of what they had.) Unlike a new WP8 app, upgrading to multilingual was not an easy task. A Resource directory had to be added and several strategic pieces of code had to be added to handle the resource files. For some reason I had missed something in upgrading this one app. No matter what language you set the phone to, the app was in English.

So, I abandoned trying to tweak the app to get it to work and just created a new WP8 app. Turning on the Multilingual Toolkit, adding a few target languages was all that was needed to create a generic multilingual phone app. Then came the task of actually making the app useful.

• All the files for the other pages of the original app and any extra files were copied to the directory of the new project.
• All the extra references including the Phone Toolkit from were added.
• The extra code from the original App.xaml and Mainpage.xaml were added to the project.
• The records from the original AppResources.resx were copied to the new AppResources.resx
• The project was compiled
• The XLF files were selected and the translations were machine generated
• One more compile

And it worked. Still not sure what exactly was wrong with the upgraded file, but I did notice that the new App.XAML did contain some resource handling code that was not in the upgraded version. Adding the missing code did not help, but it did indicate that there was something else missing.

So yes, I could have spent more time tracking down what was wrong, but it did show that starting with a clean program was a better choice. I would never know if there was something waiting to bite me.

In WP8, the process of adding multiple languages is simple

• Install the Multilingual Toolkit
• Turn it on
• Populate AppResources with your phrases.
• Find all the reference for Text= and Content=
• Change the fixed text to use
  Text=”{Binding Path=LocalizedResources.thestring, Source={StaticResource LocalizedStrings}}” in the XAML and AppResources.thestring in the C# code
• Compile
• Select the languages
• Select all the XLF files and generate a machine translation. You can improve the translations later.
• Compile

You will now have a multilingual app.

Enjoy.

John…

John Marshall… Visio MVP       Visio.MVPs.org