Reswinator

When using resw files for resources in applications targetting the Windows App SDK, there is no simple way to get strongly-typed access to the string resources contained in those resw files. This means you are left to access them similar to this:

void DoSomething()
{
    ResourceLoader loader = new ResourceLoader();
    myThing.Content = load.GetString("ThingContent");
}

And hope you've typed it correctly.

In resx files – the predecessor of resw – Visual Studio would generate a Resources.Designer.cs whenever you edited the file which provided strongly typed access to resources. This wasn't continued for resw. Additionally that file was committed to the repo, and not generated with every build.

Reswinator does exactly that -- generates a strongly typed accessor at build time.

Installation

Add the Rewsinator nuget package to your project.

Thats it!

Usage

Add a resw to your project following the Microsoft guidelines and build.

Thats it!

Now you can access you're resources this way:

void DoSomething()
{
    myThing.Content = (namespace).Resources.ThingContent;
}

If you have resources with . in them, they'll become nested classes. E.g for a key name such as MyThing.Text, the class will nest like such:

(namespace).Resources.MyThing.Text

Q&A

What namespace does it generate the resource class into?

Whatever your projects RootNamespace property is. If you haven't specified this the namespace will be GeneratedResources.

How does it know which resw to generate for when there are multiple langauges?

It uses the projects default langauge (as specified in the project), and looks for only resw files that match that language

What if I have multiple resw files?

They're generated into different classes that match the file name. E.g. Errors.resw becomes <namspace>.Errors. The default Resources.resw will always be Resources.

Files that have . them will have those removed to generate the class name for those resources. If there is an existing resource wrapper class with that name, a number will be suffixed to that class name

Do you support this other runtime that uses resw?

We only support Windows App SDK targets at this time. If you wish support for others, then file an issue. Pull requests are also welcome!