Why are the Global.asax events not firing in my ASP .NET website?

How are you logging? Is it possible that your logging component is not correctly set up? For a quick test try throwing an exception inside Application_Start and that will tell you quickly whether or not the event is being raised.

I had a similar problem and I was wrestling with it for several days. The initial problem was something else - cookies not being set in Application's EndRequest handler. Finally I somehow managed to realize, that the problem actually was that the event is not being fired at all. It took some time to find that out, because all was working fine on my machine. But on the production server - quiet as a tomb.

I am only writing this, because I really hope to save from troubles at least one person.

The real reason for the problem was a missing global.asax file on the production server.

The global.asax file was present on my computer, because the development environment is located there. I had prepared a deployment bat file, which coppies files from the development folder, removes the unnecessary ones and makes a package. Well - the global.asax file was marked for deletion in that script. After starting to deploy it all the problems went away.

I hope I helped.

If you make a request to your app does the "Application_Start" fire then? I don't believe it will be started until the first request is made.