C#® Developer's Guide to ASP.NET, XML, and ADO.NET

Initializing Web Applications Using Global.asax

ASP.old provided a file, global.asa, that provided functionality specific to the ASP application and session. You would typically put initialization code in global.asa, which provided a set of event-handling procedures for this purpose.

ASP.NET provides a similar functionality in the file Global.asax. Four categories of entries can appear in a Global.asax file:

• Application directives

• Code declaration blocks

• Server-side object tags

• Server-side includes

Each of these four categories of entries is discussed in more detail in the next few sections.

Note that when you make a change to Global.asax, as with all ASP.NET files, the binary representation of the script will be automatically recompiled. This isn't ...