Question

I’ve got TeamCity setup as my CI solution to build, package, and deploy (via MSBuild/Web Deploy) my ASP.NET MVC 3 web application.

Works great.

However, in the Application_Start event for my application, i do various startup activities such as pre-warming a cache.

I would like to add a TeamCity build task (post deploy) to somehow call this method (so the first manual user request isn’t waiting).

The only thing that comes to mind is use a powershell script to basically ping/wget the website.

Is there a better solution – perhaps an option as part of the MSBuild deploy task?

Answer 1

Went with a simple powershell script, as a TeamCity build step:

Source: MSDN

# webclient.ps1
# Web client sample recoded in PowerShell
# Converted from MSDN C# Sample
# Thomas Lee  - [e-mail]

# get a web page (author's blog)
$client = new-object system.net.WebClient
$client.Headers.Add("user-agent", "PowerShell")
$data = $client.OpenRead("http://www.mywebsite.com/")
$reader = new-object system.io.StreamReader $data
[string] $s = $reader.ReadToEnd()
# display output
"The returned document is {0} bytes" -f $s.length.tostring("###,###,##0")

# close
$data.Close()
$reader.Close()