Page Names: ASP.Net Web Forms Site, Deploying Multiple Languages - asp.net

Question

Sorry about the title, couldn't think of a good way to describe it briefly. On to the question...
I've written a site in ASP.NET using web forms and have used resource files to handle static text for multiple languages and our Database is setup for multiple languages, so everything is localized. It's as easy as switching culture and uiCulture in web.config to switch the site between French and English.
However, the french site has to be deployed with folders and page names translated to French. Example, http://www.product.com/accessories/category.aspx?id=111 needs to be http://www.produit.com/accesoires/categories.aspx?id=111
Aside from making copies of all the ASPX pages (not the code behinds), changing their names to the French equivalent and leaving their code-behind to point to the original aspx.cs... what is the preferred/proper/nice way to do this?
Please note: URLs referenced in the pages/code themselves are built dynamically so they will be localized as well.
Thank you!

Answer 1

Have you tried having a look at routing in asp.net? http://www.hanselman.com/blog/OneASPNETSneakPeekElegantWebFormsAndSnowballsInHell.aspx

Answer 2

I can't use routing as the server is running .NET 2.0 and routing wasn't introduced into the framework until 3.5 SP1. So I had to resort to URL rewriting.
In web.config I added:
<system.web>
<httpModules>
<add name="UrlRewriter" type="Utilities.UrlRewriter, MyProject"/>
...
<system.webServer>
<modules>
<add name="UrlRewriter" type="Utilities.UrlRewriter, MyProject"/>
I then created UrlRewriter which inherits IHttpModule, and in the Init method added a handler for HttpApplication.BeginRequest.
In BeginRequest I inspect the URL and replace localized folder names and page names with their English equivalent. For e.g. /mysite.com/a-propos-de-nous/ is converted to /mysite.com/about-us/ but the user still sees the French URL in their browser.
There's a bit of checking to do to convert the URL but it works well enough and the checking/replacing isn't horrid.
I have a couple quirks to figure out, if the URL comes in as /mysite.com/a-propos-de-nous (notice the missing '/' at the end) the rewrite works, but the URL in the browser address bar gets changed to /mysite.com/about-us which is not desired.
If any one has any additional thoughts, comments, or experience in localizing URLs please add to the thread.
[Edit - Feb. 28, 2013] - RE: lack of trailing slash in URL entered in browser
Adding this to make this more complete in case someone stumbles upon it.
The problem here is that IIS adds a courtesy trailing slash and this creates a redirect. To handle this case what I've done here is to inspect the URL and determine if it contains a page/file at the end of the URL. I use the following in my Url rewrite code:
void UrlRewriter_BeginRequest(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
HttpApplication app = (HttpApplication)sender;
... // other rewrite code here
string lastSegment = app.Request.Url.Segments[app.Request.Url.Segments.Length - 1];
string extension = System.IO.Path.GetExtension(lastSegment);
// no extension, must be a directory/folder
if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(extension))
{
if (!sendTo.EndsWith("/"))
sendTo = sendTo + "/";
}
app.Context.RewritePath(sendTo);
}