Accessing Data From DataList In Page Load

New to VB.net, and trying to re-factor an 'old-skool' ASP page where all the page logic is happening on the .aspx page itself, to code-behind. Basically, I have a button that has a state, either on or off. If on, I set a hidden field to 1, if off, I set it to 0 (the default when a user visits the page).The goal is to simply change the message I am sending to the user.[code]The above code produces the following effect: when I click the button, setting the state to 1 and the page reloads, in Page_Load, I am getting zero results from the If dlList.Items.Count > 0 Then check, and thus am showing the 'No results' message, but the actual asp:DataList on the MyPage.aspx page is returning results... and then if I click the button again, setting it back to 0, in Page_Load, the datalist is now returning results, so I set the text to 'Results', but again, the control on the MyPage.aspx page behaves correctly, and shows no results, as expected. Now keep in mind that the above works perfectly in terms of checking the number of results if I move the If dlList.Items.Count > 0 Then page logic out of Page_Load and back to the MyPage.aspx file, it all works fine (i.e. results when state = 1, none when state = 0)