ASP.NET codebehind not executed in deployed app
<p>I have an ASP.NET web application hosted on a shared web server. Recently I made some changes to it using Visual Server 2008 (code changes only, no changes to ASPX), and uploaded new DLLs to my bin folder on the server.</p>

<p>When I reload any of my pages I get the following strange symptom: The page is rendered, without runtime error, but it appears that none of the code in the codebehind file has executed (e.g. Page Load, control events). The static content all appears, but none of the content that is normally rendered by server code. I've personally never seen a DLL-loading issue that manifested this way - if the DLL could not be loaded I'd expect to see a runtime error about failure to load the class that the page inherits from.</p>

<p>I am wondering if anyone has seen this effect before? I'll list below, as clues, the factors I can think of that might be relevant in my scenario:</p>

<ul>
<li><p>When I was last working on this app (it's been a while) I think was using VS Web Developer Express 2005. In the course of making this change (upgraded to VS2008) I converted from that horrible "web site" model to a proper Web Application project. All rebuilt fine and worked on my machine, but... ?</p></li>
<li><p>When developing on my local machine I changed the solution platform from "Any CPU" to x86. That was because I'm now running 64bit Windows but needing to use the Jet OLEDB provider which apparently won't run in 64bit mode. (I also had to made the app run in a 32-bit app pool). So I thought my problem might be caused by the CPU target of the DLLs being incompatible with the hosting server's web process. But, after switching back to "Any CPU" and re-building, I still have the same problem. Maybe I've still got my build configuration messed up? (this is the first time I've had to meddle with CPU target)</p></li>
<li><p>Perhaps I need to change the solution to target .Net Framework 2.0 rather than 3.5? Again, if that was the problem I'd expect a runtime error...?</p></li>
<li><p>My app doesn't use a custom error page - but I think it does have CustomErrors="On" on the server. Still - this wouldn't prevent a runtime error page from being displayed, would it? It just wouldn't contain any error detail.</p></li>
</ul>

<p>I'm currently stumped - any ideas appreciated!</p>
