MissingManifestResourceException on Windows Phone 8.1 with .resx resources

Question

I'm developing a Windows Phone 8.1 app that also targets Android(Xamarin)

As ever I added my string resources(.resx) on a PCL and referenced them on my launcher project to use it on my views, this all works fine on WP 8.1 silverlight but on the WinRt when I configure the project to release and run it on a device, for some reason I always get a MissingManifestResourceException. I've tried every solution for this problem out there without any success.

Note that on the emulator everything works fine, when the solution configurator is set to Debug it also works on both device and emulator. The only combination here is device and Release.

The app source code is on Github.

I was able to create a simple project to replicate this issue, basically it is a WP 8.1 app and a PCL project with the embedded resources, Download Link

Anyone has any ideas?

EDIT: After making some more testing I tried running an old Windows 8.1 app that I've done with the same localisation model and the same issue appeared so it seams to be a tool issue and not a configuration issue, since the Windows 8.1 app is on the market and everything went fine back there.

Answer 1

Our team ran into a similar issue which was tracked down to the runtime and not the PCL, WinRT component, or application package. That is, the resources exist within the PCL assembly, within the application package resources.pri file, but just cannot be found at runtime.

There is an active Microsoft Connect report here:

https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/991028/issue-using-resx-files-on-winrt-apps-windows-phone-and-windows

Our workaround was for the WinRT component to inject into each generated Resources class of each referenced PCL our own derived ResourceManager which redirected the call to the WinRT ResourceLoader instead. I've written a blog post that describes that workaround:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/philliphoff/archive/2014/11/19/missingmanifestresourceexception-when-using-portable-class-libraries-in-winrt.aspx