Regarding this feature where .NET watches a directory for changes and restarts, is there some way of disabling it? I have a folder that contains changing items and I want to exclude this folder from forcing the site to reload. I have tried moving the folder around but since it contains DLLs used by the site it seems that it gets watched regardless of where I put it. There must be SOME way of configuring the service to ignore a folder

This has all been very interesting and illuminating. I now have a clearer understanding of features of IIS.

But my problem appears to be an animal of a different stripe. When one of my users loses his credentials being held in the Session, all users lose their credentials and are presented the login page instead of the requested page.

Now, each person’s Session is actually an element in an object that holds all the “Sessions.” (A Dictionary object I believe.) Since all Sessions evaporate at the same time, I am presuming this central object is being reset, or abandoned and recreated.

If anyone has any insight on what mechanism might be at play here, I’d be really happy to hear it.

Hi Brian,

Isn't this what most of the posters had problems with? When the IIS process is recycled, or web.config is touched, the *whole* session state goes down.

Did any of the situations apply to you? That is, do you have application pools set to recycle automatically at a certain interval for example?

Take a look here: http://blogs.msdn.com/david.wang/arc...e_on_IIS6.aspx for some more background.

Imar
---------------------------------------
Imar Spaanjaars
http://Imar.Spaanjaars.Com
Everyone is unique, except for me.
Author of ASP.NET 2.0 Instant Results and Beginning Dreamweaver MX / MX 2004
Want to be my colleague? Then check out this post.

Got the same problem: Session vars disappear!

Using trace="on", could see session vars on page load but on post back all session vars gone! Didn't show up until switched from asp.net 1.x to 2.0

Took awhile but I did find the cause. Not in the vb source code...it's in one of the asp:image... tags! Two ways to fix or work-around:

1) Remove or comment out asp:image tag
   (just ones with missing imageURL should do)
2) Add imageURL="valid link" to asp:image tags (if missing)

To test, deleted almost all code in the code behind. Except for setting about 5 session vars on page load and one in post back.
I didn't try imageURL with an invalid link to see if that blows-up all the session vars too, geez, I hope not.

In original asp.net 1.x version the imageURL fragment was set in code. At design time, the imageURL was left blank. This didn't affect the session vars as it seems to do now under asp.net 2.0

<!--
If I may politically digress, hasn't someone read you the book 'The Earth is Flat'...Session Vars CAN'T DISAPPEAR...you're wrong!!!!
-->

I've noticed this is one of several problems that seem to have no solution...;)

On further review, there seems to be more than one issue that can cause disappearing session vars.

Older documents document, undocumented behavior of ReadOnly session vars: "If you attempt to write to a read-only session variable, no exception is thrown but a new session ID is generated...can create subtle bugs in your code...check the IsReadOnly property before assigning..."

<%@ Page EnableSessionState="ReadOnly %>

On hosted servers with garderns, farms and proprietary performance enhancers it may not be impossible to track session var behavior but software source generation performance can be severely reduced