How to detect browser Operating System (OS) with ASP.NET

14-04-2008 15:10:30

Last week, I did solve another operating system different problem.

The problem started when I should post a specific operating system program from a link, My first opinion was to try the embedded ASP.NET request "Request.Browser.Platform", I works quite well on MAC, XP and so on, but when i did try Vista, It just returns "WinNT", which also is used for naming Windows 2000.

So I couldn't use this "smart" function anyway. So I did take a look on the User Agent from the browser instead, which is more informative than the embedded platform function.

You can use "Request.UserAgent" if you're programming ASP.NET, otherwise it quite simple to get through other programming languages or the client script by Javascript.

Back to the returns of "Request.UserAgent" which is for an example

"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; da; rv:1.8.1.13) Gecko/20080311 Firefox/2.0.0.13"..

Some of these information's returns which browser system, browser version, operating system and version you are using, which is very usefully, when you're trying to determine the user operating system. If you knows the user operating system (You can request it in ASP.NET by "Request.Browser.Platform", and wants to know know the specific version like 2000, XP and Vista.

You can check if the OS version number is in the User agent. If you're looking in the example I did post above this text, you can see a Windows NT number, that's the number who indicate the specific Windows version. "Windows NT 5.1" means that this user is using Windows XP.

You can find the specific version number on this page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Windows_versions. And after this research I could delivery the correct file for the specific operating system (OS). Hope some of you, could use this information, please make a comment if you're having some questions, other ways to get this information, feel free to contact me.



Kommentarer

M.m.22-10-2009 12:17:41

thaaaaaaaaaaanx

cosmin22-10-2009 12:20:30

What about arhitecture? x86 or x64?

IE puts WOW64 or x64 in UserAgent, but firefox has identical versions since its compiled only in x86. Bummer. :)

Daniel Nøhr22-10-2009 12:20:55

Actually I haven't found any article on it.

But it could be great for a Software website, when choosing the right software, for the client machine.


Tilføj en kommentar

Navn
Email (Bliver ikke vist på siden)
Hjemmeside
Hvad er 2 + 3?
Kommentar
 
Copyright © 2005 - 2010 Daniel Nøhr. All rights reserved