Question

i’m trying to set my website’s culture programmatically, so when a user clicks a button they can change the text on the page from english to spanish. here’s my code:

protected void btnChangeLanguage(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = new CultureInfo("es");
    Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = new CultureInfo("es);
}

<asp:Label ID="lblDisplay" runat="server" meta:ResourceKey="lblDisplay" />

<asp:Button ID="btnChangeLanguage" runat="server" Text="Change Language"
        OnClick="btnChangeLanguage_Click" />

i have a Default.aspx.resx file with a key/value of: lblDisplay.text/English
and a Default.aspx.es.resx file with a key/value of: lblDisplay.text/Espanol

i can’t get my Label’s text to change from “English” to “Spanish”. anyone see what i’m doing wrong?

Answer 1

ASP.Net threads are used for the lifetime of one request, not a user’s entire session. Worse, sometimes the framework will recycle the same thread to handle additional requests rather than return it to the pool and get a new one (it’s not that big a deal because the next request will initialize the culture again, but still).

Instead, you need to override the InitializeCulture() method for your page. See this link for more detail:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bz9tc508.aspx