What are "IIS simulated HTTP requests"?

Question

Does anybody know where I can find details about the IIS simulated HTTP requests feature identified at System.Web.Hosting.IProcessHostPreloadClient ?

I'm trying to do the "usual" ASP.NET site warmup thing to ensure speedy response times after an application pool recycle, similar to How to warm up an ASP.NET MVC application on IIS 7.5?

I'm using:

• Windows Server 2008 R2
• IIS 7.5
• .NET 4.0
• ASP.NET MVC 3

The remarks in the IProcessHostPreloadClient docs (see above link) explictly state:

This interface is intended primarily for use by WCF applications that are non-HTTP applications. ASP.NET developers who want to preload ASP.NET Web applications should use the simulated HTTP requests in IIS 7.0...

Please note that this question is not about IProcessHostPreloadClient, which I have successfully implemented and launched an HttpWebRequest to warmup my site; it is essentially the same as a similar question, which in turn has several other duplicates/reposts across the web but was never actually answered.

Other (apparent) red herrings:

• An IIS "Application Warmup module" (http://forums.iis.net/t/1176740.aspx), which is no longer available and seems to have been a plugin rather than a core feature.
• aspnet_compiler, which doesn't trigger Application_Start.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I cannot claim I completely understand what it means, but by the sounds of it and based on this article - http://gunnarpeipman.com/2010/01/asp-net-4-0-how-to-use-application-warm-up-class/

In IProcessHostPreloadClient you do not have any HTTP context so you cannot do anything related to HTTP. You are on your own basically. WCF can work with protocols other than HTTP and hence the MSDN might be saying that this interface is primarily meant for WCF.