How does MVC4 detect a mobile browser?

Question

I've just followed Scott Hanselmans tutorial on making a switchable site in MVC4.

I'm using the Opera mobile emulator to test as I don't have VS2102.

When rendering my page in the emulator Request.Browser.IsMobileDevice is false although it still renders the mobile view.

My questions are:

• Why/How does MVC4 decide to render the mobile view? It doesn't seem like it looks at Request.Browser.IsMobileDevice.
• Will the View Switcher be displayed on a real mobile device?

Edit:

I think I realised my mistake:

To get it to work with the opera emulator I added a MobileDisplayMode as described here: ASP.NET MVC 4 Mobile Features

It seems that that solution works with rendering correctly but Request.Browser.IsMobileDevice won't work. The same goes for ViewContext.HttpContext.GetOverriddenBrowser().IsMobileDevice is there a way to get around this?

Answer 1

MVC recognize Mobile device by matching the HTTP request header with browser config files present in C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\Config\Browsers

The asp.net MVC browser detection approach is not great so i recommend using some sort of DDR