Question

I’m developing bilingual ASP.NET Application and I want to know hat is the best way to store UICulture and Culture values all over the application?

• Cookies.
• Session.
• QueryString.
• Or something else.

Update:
I want to make the same ASPX form to be bilingual pages, what I’ve got an answers till now is to make a separate page and make it accessible by sub-domain, what I’m really doing now is using Session, but i want to now what is the best practice to user Resource file to make the page bilingual without creating another copy of it.

Answer 1

As often, it depends on your particular use case.

Most often however you’d probably want to have a different URL for each page and language in order to have it indexed properly by search engines. For example URL’s like:

• http://en-us.example.com/index.htm
• http://www.example.com/en-us/index.htm
• http://www.example.com/index.htm?l=en-us

I prefer the first 2 options.

Optionally, you could redirect the user based on their browser language when they first arrive on your site (but please make sure that the user still can browse the other languages).

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Update: This doesn’t mean you’ll have to make as many versions of your site as you have languages.

If you have a subdomain for each language:

• Point each subdomain to your site
• In the codebehind of your pages, you override the InitializeCulture method (you may use a base class for all pages in order to keep it DRY)
• Set the appropriate culture in the overridden InitializeCulture method
• Create your resource files
• Use the resources in your pages – the correct translation will be displayed depending on the culture.

If you decide not to use subdomains but include the culture name in your URL, you may use URL-rewriting to point to the same page from each URL.

Some code to get you started:

protected override void InitializeCulture() {
    // Identify the culture and replace the hardcoded values below
    // (Use Request.Url.xxx for example)
    Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = new CultureInfo("en", false);
    Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = new CultureInfo("en-US", false);
    base.InitializeCulture();
}