A mystery solved

Today, I was trying to solve a problem where on our French site, a specification number (which is a decimal number) of the same product  was toggling between 1.3 and 1,3 intermittently.  It should be 1,3 for French.  It turned out the problem was in two folds.


First of all, the following code is being used to convert decimal to string:
//specNumber = 1.3;
specNumber.ToString();


Secondly, the app is running on two load balanced servers.  One server's region and language is set up as:

 while the other is set up as below:

That explains why the value is appearing as 1.3 or 1,3 intermittently.


To address this problem, we need to fix it in code.  When the site is being browsed in French we'll use:

   var fr = CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture("fr-CA");
   specNumber.ToString(fr.NumberFormat);

That way, the code is not dependent on the server region and language settings.

Asp.net View (Webform View) to Razor View Translator

If you need to have asp.net views translated to Razor views, you might be interested in checking out Teleriks 

Razor Converter.

Custom Routing in MVC

In MVC, by default, out of the box routing pattern is {controller}/{action}/{id} where id is optional as defined in the Global.asax.cs:

            routes.MapRoute
                (
                    "Default", // Route name
                    "{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters
                    new {controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional} // Parameter defaults
                );

However, this will not always meet your needs.  In such case, you can create custom routes.  For instance, let's say it is a requirement that the "HR (Human Resource)"  department of your company should have their own unique URL in a pattern like this: "Hr/PersonalProfile/Display/1234".  Custom route can be utilized to make this work:

            routes.MapRoute
                (
                    "Hr", // The name must be unique in a route table
                    "Hr/PersonalProfile/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters
                    new {controller = "PersonalProfile", action = "Display", id = UrlParameter.Optional} // Parameter defaults                );

Now you can display a personal profile using this URL: http://{yourdomian}/Hr/PersonalProfile/Display/1234

One very important thing to note is that MVC tries to find matching route in the order of the routes registration.

In our example, the custom route "Hr" must be registered before the default route is.  Otherwise, when the site is accessed with the URL "http://{yourdomian}/Hr/PersonalProfile/Display/1234", it matches the default route and it will try to look for a controller named "Hr" which doesn't exist.  This, of course, results in an error as below:

Server Error in '/' Application.

---

The resource cannot be found.

Description: HTTP 404. The resource you are looking for (or one of its dependencies) could have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.  Please review the following URL and make sure that it is spelled correctly.

Requested URL: /Hr/PersonalProfile/Display

Phil Haack created a very useful tool for debugging MVC routing: route debugger and you can get it through NuGet package management tool.  Just type in the following command in Package Manager Console:

PM> install-package routedebugger

If you're not familiar with NuGet, read about it here.  And download it from here.

Hide MVC version # and Asp.Net version # from HTTP Header

By default, Asp.Net and Mvc emit the version numbers in the HTTP header as below:

In the figure above, X-AspNet-Version is the Asp.net version and X-AspNetMvc-Version is version number of System.Web.Mvc version number as shown below:

But for some reason that you don't want the world know that you're running your app on Asp.net and MVC, you can turn them off.

To remove  X-AspNet-Version from the header, set the value of enableVersionHeader of httpRuntime tag to false the web.config as follows:

  <system.web>
    <httpRuntime enableVersionHeader ="false" />

To remove X-AspNetMvc-Version from the header, you can modify the application_start event in Global.asax.cs as follows:
 protected void Application_Start()
        {
            MvcHandler.DisableMvcResponseHeader = true;



After making above changes in my app, the end result of the header looks like this: