Republished with Permission - Original Article

This is the seventh in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release.

I’m going to switch from discussing new VS 2010 tooling features and instead do a few posts covering a few new runtime features (don’t worry – I’ll come back to a lot more VS features, I’m just trying to mix things up a bit).

Today’s post covers a small, but nice, new feature that you can now optionally take advantage of with ASP.NET 4 - the ability to automatically startup and proactively initialize a web application without having to wait for an external client to hit the web server.  This can help you provide a faster response experience for the first user who hits the server, and avoids you having to write custom scripts to “warm up” the server and get any data caches ready.  It works with all types of ASP.NET applications – including both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC based applications.