ASP.NET: Changing a site's culture programmatically - asp.net

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

Answer 2

Create Session variable called "CurrentUI". and change it on link buttons event
eg:
Here i have two link buttons for each language
protected void EnglishLinkButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) {
Session["CurrentUI"] = "en-US";
Response.Redirect(Request.Url.OriginalString);
}
protected void SinhalaLinkButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) {
// සිංහල (ශ්‍රී ලංකා)
Session["CurrentUI"] = "si-LK";
Response.Redirect(Request.Url.OriginalString);
}
Now you need to override the InitializeCulture() in the base class of page
protected override void InitializeCulture() {
if (Session["CurrentUI"] != null) {
String selectedLanguage = (string)Session["CurrentUI"];
UICulture = selectedLanguage;
Culture = selectedLanguage;
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture =
CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture(selectedLanguage);
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = new
CultureInfo(selectedLanguage);
}
base.InitializeCulture();
}
Note that I used
//Response.Redirect(Request.Url.OriginalString);
after assigning culture key into the session in order to create a second post back to the page.
Because InitializeCulture() happens before the event and change will be applicable in the next request only.