Globalization using ASP.NET

Sometimes our application may need to cater content in different languages for different country users. Let us see in this article how to cater different contents based on the culture using Globalization in ASP.NET.

Globalization is the process of designing and developing a software product that function for multiple cultures. A web forms page have two culture values ,Culture and UICulture. Culture is used to determine culture dependent function such as Date, Currency. So it is used for date formatting ,number formatting. UICulture values is used to determine which language the resources should load that is which UIstring the resource should use. The two culture settings do not need to have same values. It may be different depending on the application.

Setting Culture and UICulture

 

1. Through Web.Config

<configuration>
<system.web>
<globalization fileEncoding="utf-8" requestEncoding="utf-8" responseEncoding="utf-8" culture="en-US" uiCulture="fr-FR"/>
</system.web>
</configuration>

2. In Code-inline (aspx) Page

<%@ Page UICulture="fr" Culture="en-US" ....%>

Now, suppose I want to change the current culture programmatically, I can use following code to set the new culture.

3. In Code-Behind (aspx.cs) Page

using System.Globalization;
using System.Threading;

protected void Page_Init(object sender, EventArgs e)

    {

        Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = new CultureInfo("en-US", false);

    }

Reference Links:-

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb386581.aspx