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Why did Microsoft choose to change the resources management system from .NET's RESX files?

RESX had useful code generation, providing developers auto-completion for resources names and outputting IMHO very readable code.

The new RESW format is as far as I know, the same bare XML files, but without any code generation, forcing developers to write more code, and depriving them of compile time error detection.

gnat
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pleasereset
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1 Answers1

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While this article on MSDN doesn't go much into detail as to the "why", it rather explicitly states the "what."

In Windows Store apps, you use .resw files to create resources. Despite the difference of file extension, the .resw file format is identical to the .resx file format, except that .resw files may contain only strings and file paths.

While answering the "why" requires speculation or inside knowledge (my guess is "to save on file writes in the final App"), the fact that the syntax is idental means that you should be able to use whatever tooling you had to create resx files to produce Windows 8 compatible resw files. (in fact, you may be compiling the resx into resm, similar to how LESS or DART are processed into CSS or JavaScript.)

DougM
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