What actually causes Session_Start to be called?

Question

In a little demo application that I'm building I put code to initialize the database in the Global.Session_Start() event. However, I notice that this event does not fire when I'm running through the app in the debugger on the development server (haven't tested it anywhere else yet).

Question 1: What gives? When does Session_Start() actually get called? I assume it is when the session starts but shouldn't the beginning of every new sequence of requests cause a session to start automatically? Certainly a session should start whenever I run with F5 so why doesn't it.

Question 2: Is there a better place where the code to initialize the database should go? i would rather not put it in the Application_Start method, since it does not always get called when debugging.

PS. By initialize database I do not mean I open a connection to SqlServer and leave it open forever. I am using db4o and I open a pre-built database file. Like I said this is just a demo application, I'm not worried about poor resource management or anything like that.

Answer 1

I know this is an old post but maybe this will help somebody:

The session_start doesn't fire unless you are actually reading or writing to the session object.

If you want to utilize the session_start event but don't need to use the session store at all, you can add the following to the page directive of your landing pages:

<%@ Page EnableSessionState="ReadOnly" %>

This will cause the session_start event to fire without you having to store anything in the session object.