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June 19, 2013
Windows Phone Developer Blog

Windows Phone Toolkit June 2013 update – summary

This blog post was authored by Rohan Thakkar, a Program Manager on the Windows Phone team.

– Adam


Windows Phone Toolkit June 2013 update is now ready to download

Source code: https://phone.codeplex.com/SourceControl/latest

NuGet package: https://nuget.org/packages/WPtoolkit/

 

The Windows Phone Toolkit project has always been an open source vehicle for the Windows Phone Developer Platform team to ship code that will truly help app developers. In the June 2013 update we fixed top issues reported for the October 2012 release and added localization support for all 51 countries or regions supported in Windows Phone 8.

To address localization, we followed guidance from the blog post Tips for localizing Windows Phone apps – Part 2. In addition, to be able to share the resources between Windows Phone 7.5 and Windows Phone 8, we created a common shared project called “Microsoft.Phone.Controls.Localization” in the solution’s folder named Microsoft.Phone.Controls.Localization on CodePlex. The sole purpose of the shared project is to integrate the Multilingual App Toolkit with the Windows Phone Toolkit. It has no other files and is empty. Under the solution’s configuration manager, this project is marked to not be built. This way, anyone who only wants the toolkit source code doesn’t need to download the Multilingual App Toolkit. However, if you want to add your own localization support and build the Microsoft.Phone.Controls.Localization project, you’ll need to download and install the Multilingual App Toolkit.

To give you more info, we’ve included the release notes for the Windows Phone Toolkit June 2013 update.

Installation

Instead of an MSI-based installer, you get the June 2013 update for the toolkit from NuGet or by compiling directly from source code. Here are some details for downloading and installing the toolkit.

  • If you have Visual Studio 2012 installed, congratulations, you already have NuGet!
  • If you don’t already have NuGet installed, go to http://nuget.org and install the NuGet Visual Studio extension.
  • Be sure that you have NuGet version 2.1 or later for Windows Phone 8 projects.
  • After you have NuGet installed, install the Windows Phone Toolkit package from http://nuget.org/packages/wptoolkit.
  • Optionally, you can download the source and compile the assembly yourself.
  • If you’re compiling the source yourself, you’ll also need the Multilingual App Toolkit for Visual Studio 2012 to avoid warnings that the localized .resx files are missing.

What’s new

Localization update

Windows Phone Toolkit controls are now completely localized to support all the countries and regions that are natively supported by Windows Phone 8. This was done with the help of the Multilingual App Toolkit for Visual Studio 2012.
The following localizations are available:

Windows Phone 8

ar-SA

az-Latn-AZ

be-BY

bg-BG

ca-ES

cs-CZ

da-DK

de-DE

el-GR

en-GB

en-US

es-ES

es-MX

et-EE

fa-IR

fi-FI

fil-PH

fr-FR

fr-CA

he-IL

hi-IN

hr-HR

hu-HU

id-ID

it-IT

ja-JP

kk-KZ

ko-KR

lt-LT

lv-LV

mk-MK

ms-MY

nb-NO

nl-NL

pl-PL

pt-BR

pt-PT

ro-RO

ru-RU

sk-SK

sl-SI

sq-AL

sr-Latn-CS

sv-SE

th-TH

tr-TR

uk-UA

uz-Latn-UZ

vi-VN

zh-CN

zh-TW

       

Windows Phone 7.5
The same as before but with some changes in the names of the countries or regions supported:

cs-cz

da-dk

de-de

el-gr

en-US

en-gb

es-es

fi-FI

fr-fr

hu-HU

it-IT

ja-JP

ko-KR

nb-NO

nl-NL

pl-PL

pt-BR

pt-PT

ru-RU

sv-SE

zh-CN

zh-TW

     

The specific changes for Windows Phone 7.5 are:

cs

->

cs-cz

el

->

el-GR

da

->

da-DK

fi

->

fi-FI

hu

->

hu-HU

ja

->

ja-JP

ko

->

ko-KR

pl

->

pl-PL

ru

->

ru-RU

Gesture listener sample

The gesture listener sample has been updated to show how Windows Phone 8 apps can avoid a dependency on the XNA assemblies.

SpeechTextbox

A new sample control shows how to create a speech-enabled TextBox control by extending the PhoneTextBox control to use speech recognition in Windows Phone 8.

Fixes

As in previous releases of the Windows Phone Toolkit, fixing toolkit issues is a top priority. For a full list of fixes, see Windows Phone Toolkit fixes.

Samples

There is a full-featured sample app that demonstrates how to use each of the Windows Phone Toolkit controls. We highly recommend that you download the latest source code and run the sample app to find examples of how to use the controls you plan to include in your apps.