Question

I have a Windows Azure web role that contains a web site using ASP.NET MVC. When an HTTP request arrives and a page is first loaded the view (.aspx or .cshtml) is compiled and that takes some time and so the first time a page is served it takes notable longer than later serving the same page.

I’ve enabled <MvcBuildViews> (described in this answer) to enforce compile-time validation of views, but that doesn’t seem to have any effect on their compilation when the site is deployed and running.

Azure web roles have so-called startup tasks and also a special OnStart() method where I can place whatever warmup code, so once I know what to do adding that into the role is not a problem.

Is there a way to force compilation of all views?

Answer 1

Turns out there’s ASP.NET Precompilation that can be performed using ClientBuildManager.PrecompileApplication and mimics the on-demand compilation behavior, but just compiles every page. Tried it – the first load looks notably faster.

The non-trivial part is what to pass as ClientBuildManager constructor parameters. The solution is to enumerate all .Applications of the Site object and for each item in .Applications enumerate all .VirtualDirectories and use Path and VirtualPath from each item as parameters to ClientBuildManager constructor.