Multi-lingual web application - how do I detect the user's language in ASP.NET?
I'm building an ASP.NET web application, and all of my strings are stored in a resource file. I'd like to add a second language to my application, and ideally, I'd like to auto-detect the user's browser language (or windows language) and default to that, instead of making them choose something besides English. Currently, I'm handling all the resource population manually, so adding a second resource file and language is trivial from my point of view, if I had an easy way to automatically figure out what language to display.
Has anybody done this, or do you have any thoughts about how I might retrieve that value? Since ASP.NET is server-based, I don't seem to have any access to specific browser settings.
RESOLUTION: Here's what I ended up doing. I used a "For Each" to go through "HttpContext.Current.Request.UserLanguages" and search for one I support. I'm actually just checking the left two characters, since we don't support any dialects yet - just English and Spanish. Thanks for all the help!
Answer
Try this in the web.config:
<globalization culture="auto" uiCulture="auto" />
This will cause ASP.NET to auto-detect the client's culture from the request header. You can also set this on a per-page basis via the Page attribute.