How do you edit the browsercaps section in the machine.config file of the web server

Question

I am trying to edit the browser caps for my ASP .Net application in web.config but it seem after editing the effects are not realized in my browsers e..g Firefox and chrome, so i heard that you can put your browsercaps in machine.config but after doing that when i run my applications on my server its now saying service not available...as in like something evil happened to my machine.config file

Answer 1

Carefully, and by looking at what you're doing, ensuring you're not using odd characters (such as curved quotes, etc) and that it's well formed XML - edit it in Visual Studio or other rich editor, that will highlight syntax errors.

If you're having issues working out what should be in there, take a look at Owen Brady's amazing set of updated resources for both 1.1 and 2.0+ on his Browser Detective and BrowseCaps resources page.

You can indeed add a <browserCaps> element to a web.config to enhance the one provided in the machine.config, which is useful if you don't have access to that file (say in a shared hosting environment) - just make sure you add it in the <system.web> section.

You've not mentioned which version of ASP.NET you're using - although I guess as you're having issues with Firefox and Safari it's 1.1 - if you're running on ASP.NET 2.0, the browserCaps element is now deprecated in favour of the .Browser definition files.