Question

I have two user controls in my ASP.Net project, one that is explictly for use with Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) and another that should be used when the user’s browser is not IE6.

How would I go about setting it up so that this happens; is this something I can put in a master page?

Answer 1

You can achieve this by using the Browser property of the HttpRequest object.

Your page can either have both user-controls sited at design time, then at run time, you inspect the Request.Browser property to determine the client’s browser and programmatically hide the user-control you don’t want the user to see.
Alternatively, you can instantiate and render the correct user-control (again, after inspecting the Request.Browser property) purely from your server-side code.

For example, running the following code:

public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page 
{
    protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        Response.Write(Request.Browser.Type.ToString());

    }
}

In a “standard” ASPX page displays:

IE7

when run in Internet Explorer 7, and:

Firefox3.5.3

(when run in Firefox)

So, you could have code something like the following in the web-page that you want to add this functionality to:

public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page 
{
    protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        if (Request.Browser.Type.ToString().ToLower().Contains("ie"))
        {
            // User's browser is Internet Explorer.
            // Let's hide UserControl1 but display UserControl1
            WebUserControl1.Visible = false;
            WebUserControl2.Visible = true;
        }
        else
        {
            // User's browser is something other than Internet Explorer.
            // Let's hide UserControl2 but display UserControl1.
            WebUserControl1.Visible = true;
            WebUserControl2.Visible = false;
        }
    }
}