3.4 Application and Session Events

ASP.NET supports the Application and Session events familiar to ASP programmers. An Application_Start event is raised when the application first starts. This is a good time to initialize resources that will be used throughout the application, such as database connection strings (but not the database connection itself). An Application_End event is raised when the application ends. This is the time to close resources and do any other housekeeping that may be necessary. Note that garbage collection will automatically take care of freeing up memory, but if you allocated unmanaged resources, such as components created with languages that are not compliant with the .NET Framework, you must clean them up yourself.

Likewise there are session events. A session starts when a user first requests a page from your application and ends when the application closes the session or the session times out. A Session_Start event is raised when the session starts, at which time you can initialize resources that will be specific to the session, such as opening a database connection. When the session ends, there will be a Session_End event.