Sometimes defaults are bad. The latest Beta release has a default setting for each @Page directive, that adds the Culture and UICulture parameters as follows:

<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true"  CodeFile="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="_Default" Culture="auto" meta:resourcekey="PageResource1" UICulture="auto" %>

At first blush this may seem reasonable, even good. However we have to consider how these settings are employed at runtime to understand the hidden issues.

Automatic culture setting (as discussed in my article here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/community/authors/mlb/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnvs05/html/asp2local.asp) is intended to automatically initialize each request thread to the Culture and UICulture matching the calling user's browser language preferences. That's cool, really cool.

But, in a real world application, we don't just use the browser settings to determine user preferences. We usually collect user preferences in some other way, and persist them in a profile or other data store. I may want to select the default browser setting the first time the user accesses the site, but once I collect their preferences I would prefer to use those going forward.

The <globalization> setting for culture and uiCulture in the web.config is a better place to configure automatic culture selection, since it will apply to all pages in the site (why would you, after all, exclude a page from this?). 

<globalization culture=“auto“ uiCulture=“auto“></globalization>

With this configuration, the request thread's culture settings are initialized very early in the request cycle, even before we intercept the HttpApplication.BeginRequest event. That means we can modify this default, to draw from a data store, before the page handler is executed, and centralize the management of this process. 

If the page setting is also configured, guess what? It proceeds to update the request thread with those settings, before the page is processed. The best thing to do for now, is remove those parameters from your pages after you generate resources, to avoid problems.

<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true"  CodeFile="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="_Default" meta:resourcekey="PageResource1" %>

I know the guys working on this aspect of .NET well enough to know this is probably an oversight of the beta that will be fixed before the final release. And if I'm wrong on that, I guess we will just have some manual labor but at minimum we have a workaround. This doesn't cause any insurmountable problems.

My next article on www.TheServerSide.NET will have some code samples with this solution just for you.