Application Start not firing

Question

I have an ASP NET MVC  beta  application that I m working on  and am having trouble figuring out if I m doing something wrong  or if my Application Start method in Global asax cs is in fact not firing when I try to debug the application   I put a breakpoint on a line in my Application Start method  and am expecting that when I attempt to debug the application that the breakpoint should get hit    but it never does  Not after I reset IIS  not after I reboot  not ever  Am I missing something  Why is this method never getting called

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I had this issue in a  net 4 web forms vs2010 project and tried everything mentioned on this page  Ended up removing and adding global asax actually resolved the issue for me

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I had made some changes based on  Code Analysis on Build  from Visual Studio  Code Analysis suggested  CA1822 Mark members as static  for Application Start   in Global asax  I did that and ended up with this problem    I suggest suppressing this Code Analysis message  and not alter the signature of methods classes automatically created by platform used for bootstrapping the Application  The signature of the method Application Start probably was non-static for a reason   I reverted to this method-signature and Application Start   was firing again       protected void Application Start

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Try switching the managed pipeline mode for the app pool to  Classic  instead of  Integrated   That solved the problem for me  Looking into the reason now      Props for this answer belong to Flores  see his comment on his own answer   I just wanted to provide this as a separate answer to draw more attention to it

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Weird and crazy stuff    but debugging on a server machine and another user left IIS Express running on their session  I had to logoff that user to kill his running IIS Express processes  That seems to have fixed the problem   Update  After spending more than 1 hour chasing what was causing the problem    here s the deal  I somewhat managed to type an s inside the  lt appSettings gt  section in Web config  Visual Studio tried to warn me in the Error List window with a warning  I confess I rarely check warnings    should start checking it from now on   D As soon as I removed the offending s the breakpoint got hit in Application Start

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In my case  killing the built-in ASP NET Development Server instance via the system tray resolved the issue

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Problem mainly occurs when you try to relocate the Global asax file to another solution directory  Relocate the Global asax file again into the default location  It will work as expected

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Had the same problem in a Project we had taken over after another vendor built it  The problem was that while there were a number of commands written by the previous vendor in Global asax cs  which might lead you to believe it was in use  it was actually being ignored entirely  Global asax wasn t inheriting from it  and it s easy to never see this file if the  cs file is present - you have to right-click Global asax and click View Markup to actually see it   Global asax    lt    Application Language  C     gt    Needed to be changed to    lt    Application Codebehind  Global asax cs  Inherits  ProjectNamespace MvcApplication  Language  C     gt    Where ProjectNamespace is whatever the namespace is of your Global asax cs class  usually the name of your Project    In our case the file contained a bunch of inline code  some of which was copy-pasted from the  cs file  some not  We just dumped the inline code over to the  cs file and gradually merged our changes back in

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The following helps in any case  no matter if you re using IIS  Cassini or whatever     Set your breakpoint in Application Start Start debugging  breakpoint most probably is not hit  -  a page is shown in the browser Change web config  e g  enter a blank line  and save it Reload the page in the browser -  breakpoint is hit    Why does this work  When web config is changed  the web server  IIS  Cassini  etc   does a recycle  but in this case  for whatever reason   the process keeps the same  so you keep attached to it with the debugger  Visual Studio

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I had this problem when trying to initialize log4net    I decided to just make a static constructor for the Global asax  static Global      Do your initialization here statically

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Did you check the Project settings  I had this problem and I had the Start URL going to a different port than my server specific port  It took me too long to figure out

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I hade the same problem  couldn t catch Application Start  And the reason was that it was not firing do to a missmatch in the markup file  The markup file Global asax was inheriting another class

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If you are using the System Diagnostics Debugger Break    workaround  which I think is just fine for temporary use  and it s  just not working  on your Windows 8 Machine   The reason is a bug in Visual Studio s  Just in time debugging    The fix is as follows is to fix the key for the  Visual Studio Just-In-Time Debugger   Open regedit and go to HKEY CLASSES ROOT AppID E62A7A31-6025-408E-87F6-81AEB0DC9347  for the    AppIDFlags    registry value  set the flag to 0x8  More info here  http   connect microsoft com VisualStudio feedback details 770786 just-in-time-debugging-operation-attempted-is-not-supported

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None of the solutions described above worked for me  However reinstalling the package  Microsoft CodeDom Providers DotNetCompilerPlatform    using nuget gui is a  not too nice  walkaround

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I have just the same problem  I have made a lot of renaming in my solution  After it I got two not working web-applications and several another web-applications were all right  I got error that I have wrong routes  When I have tried to setup break point in Application Start method  and then restart IIS  VS didn t break execution  With workable web-applications break was working  Then I have recalled that  clean solution  and  rebuild  doesn t delete assemblies that left after renaming  And that was solution  I have manually cleaned bin directories of my buggy-web-applications and then saw new error in Global asax Inherits    attribute was referenced old dll  I have changed it on new and break began to work  Suppose that  during renaming Global asax wasn t updated  and IIS took old assembly  with wrong routes  to start application

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I think the application start event only gets fired when the first request is made  are you hitting your website  i e  making a request

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My same issue has been resolved by Adding reference of System Web Routing assembly in project

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I m too having problems with breakpoints in application start with IIS a hosted app  A good workaround is using Debugger Break    in code instead of the VS breakpoint

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I had a problem once where the Global asax and Global asax cs were not actually copied to IIS folder by the deployment scripts    So it worked when debugging on the development server  but not under IIS

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Close Visual Studio and delete the bin and obj folders in your web project  or all projects in the solution    Here are commands to delete these folders from all of your projects   rm   bin -r rm   obj -r

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Make sure that your global asax in not under a subdirectory  It has to be placed at root level into your project

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We had a similar problem  where global asax cs was being ignored   It turns out that the site was upgraded from a precompiled  NET 2 web site to a  NET 4 0 site   On the server  the PrecompiledApp config file had not been deleted from the root folder   After deleting it  and recycling the IIS app pool and touching web config to restart the application  code in Global asax cs started working fine

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After trying as many of the other answers as were applicable in my situation and having no luck with any of them  I went into the properties for the Web project  the server-side project for a Silverlight app using RIA Services   clicked on the  Web  tab and changed the selected Server from  Local IIS  to  IIS Express    Note I m using VS2013   This solved the problem  Application Start executes under  IIS Express  but not under  Local IIS   Interesting

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I faced this problem when using a static page  e g  index html  as the start up page - Application-Start does not get called    I discovered that serving a static page does not actually start the application   Requesting an  aspx page does

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Make sure the namespaces in Global asax and Global asax cs are same  If they are different it will not throw any error but will not hit the breakpoint also because it is not executing application start at all

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When you say  debug   do you mean actually launching the application from Visual Studio s built-in webserver for debugging  or do you mean attaching to the process in IIS  If it s the former  you should hit Application Start  but if it s the latter  it can be difficult to be on the process early enough to catch it

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A late entry     To test whether or not the IIS Application gets started before the debugger has had enough time to attach just add this to the top or bottom of your GLOBAL ASAX s Application Start   throw new ApplicationException  Yup  it fired

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If this is in IIS  the app can get started before the debugger has attached  If so  I am not sure if you can thread sleep long enough to get attached    In Visual Studio  you can attach the debugger to a process  You do this by clicking Debug    Attach to process  Attach to the browser and then hit your application  To be safe  then restart IIS and hit the site  I am not 100  convinced this will solve the problem  but it will do much better than firing off a thread sleep in App Start   Another option is temporarily host in the built in web server until you finish debugging application start

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I was trying to step through code in RegisterRoutes   called from Application start and not hitting my breakpoint   I determined Application Start was not getting called   I had to make a change to make a superficial change to App start RouteConfig cs and save it before Application Start would get called  I guess these files get cached somewhere and are not called unless a change is made

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Note   a nice easy alternative to using the inbuilt  Visual Studio Development Server  or IIS Express  e g  because you are developing against IIS and have particular settings you need for proper functioning of your app  is to simply stay running run in IIS  I use the Custom Web Server   hosts file entry   IIS binding to same domain     wait for debugging session to fire up ok then just make a whitespace edit to the root web config and save the file refresh your page  Ctrl   F5    Your breakpoint should be hit nicely  and you can continue to debug in your natural IIS habitat  Great

[c#] Application_Start not firing?

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