Four Little Known, Helpful Methods, Properties, and Features for ASP.NET Developers

Four Little Known, Helpful Methods, Properties, and Features for ASP.NET Developers

1. The Request.IsLocal and HttpContext.IsDebuggingEnabled Properties
Typically, ASP.NET developers design, implement, and test their web applications from their personal computer, visiting the website through localhost. When the site is ready to be deployed it is moved to a different web server and the visitors are remote, reaching the website from a domain name like www.yoursite.com. Likewise, when developing the application it is not uncommon to have debugging enabled, which entails going to Web.config and setting the element's debug attribute to true. However, this setting should always be set to false in production, as Scott Guthrie notes in his blog entry Don't run production ASP.NET Applications with debug="true" enabled.

Sometimes its helpful to know if the user visiting the website is coming from localhost or if debugging is enabled. For example, you might want to display debugging- or development-related information at the top of each web page, such as the time it took to execute the page or detailed information about the currently logged-in user. However, this information should not be shown to end users; rather, it should only be displayed if the user is visiting locally or if debugging is enabled.

The good news is that it's quite easy to determine whether a visitor has arrived at the site locally, thanks to the Response object's IsLocal property. Response.IsLocal returns True if the visitor is coming from localhost, False otherwise. To determine whether debugging is enabled, use the HttpContext object's IsDebuggingEnabled property. The code snippet below shows how to display a Panel (pnlDiagnosticInfo) only if the user is arriving from localhost and debugging is enabled.

// C#
if (Request.IsLocal && HttpContext.Current.IsDebuggingEnabled)
pnlDiagnosticInfo.Visible = true;


' VB
If Request.IsLocal AndAlso HttpContext.Current.IsDebuggingEnabled Then
pnlDiagnosticInfo.Visible = True
End If




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