IIS7 on Vista and languages

I installed IIS on Vista the other day, but haven’t done anything with it yet. But today I was visiting a poorly configured site that redirected to localhost, and I got an error message (as the file didn’t exist). But it was in French.

That it was in French isn’t too big a surprise (having had my computer set up for French while I was over there) but I was sure everything was back to English. I checked my Internet Explorer language settings and the two preferences were EN-nz and FR-fr.

So I added EN-us to the mix, between the two, and the message appeared in English.

What does that mean? It means that the localisation in IIS isn’t working properly. At least not like the .NET Framework one does. Actually maybe that is how it’s supposed to work, but it’s not how I’d expect it to. It was looking for a specific localised resource for EN-nz. When it couldn’t find that, rather than finding a generic EN resource, it went to the next one in my preferences, FR-fr.

I’m not sure what most users would want – the language to be one of the exact language+culture combinations they’ve chosen, or that the language is what matters most and if the language is available, they should get any culture’s variant of that language. I’d prefer the latter. However it doesn’t really matter because I understood both.