How do I set, and return, a value in Views PHP? I'm not going to use the real scenario here, just a very simple one that I think should be working.

I have a View.  This view does access some Solr stuff.  

I've added a new field to the view.  It's a Global PHP field.  My end goal of this is that I'd like to make this field sortable when you click the table heading.  

In the "Value code": 

return "asdfasdf";


In the "Output code"

&lt;?php
  print $value;
?&gt;


This returns... nothing. No errors, no output. This is the simplest example I could think of. Am I missing something here? 

"Output code" does display other things, even complex things if I ask it to.  It just seems like "Value code" is being completely ignored.
It works for me. I put the information you said in a PHP field and it printed out as expected. I imagine it's a caching issue or something else about your site that is causing the issue.