ASP.NET Auto-Start Web Applications – New in .NET 4.0!

January 23, 2011 in ASP.NET, Web

ASP.NET Auto-Start Web Applications

From MSDN excerpt:

Some Web applications need to load large amounts of data or perform expensive initialization processing before serving the first request. In earlier versions of ASP.NET, for these situations you had to devise custom approaches to “wake up” an ASP.NET application and then run initialization code during the Application_Load method in the Global.asax file.

A new scalability feature named auto-start that directly addresses this scenario is available when ASP.NET 4 runs on IIS 7.5 on Windows Server 2008 R2. The auto-start feature provides a controlled approach for starting up an application pool, initializing an ASP.NET application, and then accepting HTTP requests.

To use the auto-start feature, an IIS administrator sets an application pool in IIS 7.5 to be automatically started by using the following configuration in the applicationHost.config file:

<applicationPools>
<add name="MyApplicationPool" startMode="AlwaysRunning" />
</applicationPools>
Because a single application pool can contain multiple applications, you specify individual applications to be automatically started by using the following configuration in the applicationHost.config file:

<sites>
<site name="MySite" id="1">
<application path="/"
serviceAutoStartEnabled="true"
serviceAutoStartProvider="PrewarmMyCache" >
<!-- Additional content -->
</application>
</site>
</sites>
<!-- Additional content -->
<serviceAutoStartProviders>
<add name="PrewarmMyCache"
type="MyNamespace.CustomInitialization, MyLibrary" />
</serviceAutoStartProviders>

When an IIS 7.5 server is cold-started or when an individual application pool is recycled, IIS 7.5 uses the information in the applicationHost.config file to determine which Web applications need to be automatically started. For each application that is marked for auto-start, IIS7.5 sends a request to ASP.NET 4 to start the application in a state during which the application temporarily does not accept HTTP requests. When it is in this state, ASP.NET instantiates the type defined by the serviceAutoStartProvider attribute (as shown in the previous example) and calls into its public entry point.

You create a managed auto-start type with the necessary entry point by implementing the IProcessHostPreloadClient interface, as shown in the following example:

public class CustomInitialization : System.Web.Hosting.IProcessHostPreloadClient
{
public void Preload(string[] parameters)
{
// Perform initialization.
}
}

After your initialization code runs in the Preload method and the method returns, the ASP.NET application is ready to process requests.
With the addition of auto-start to IIS .5 and ASP.NET 4, you now have a well-defined approach for performing expensive application initialization prior to processing the first HTTP request