I recently set up the Application Initialization module on IIS 7.5 on a Windows Server 2008 R2 machine with ASP.NET 4.0 running an MVC 3 web application. It appeared to work like a charm. If I spin up IIS, I immediately see the web application spin up whose applicationPool was set to startMode="AlwaysRunning" and site had preLoad="true" in my applicationHost.config. I then set my "Idle timeout" to a low number, and happy saw that time arrive and my application immediately spun back up again. So, everything seemed to be working great. FYI, I didn't have to bother setting up anything in my web.config to indicate where the preLoad request should be directly, nor did I bother with providing a resource that would render during preLoad/warmup.
However, when I make a change to the web.config by hand, the AppDomain appears to unload as expected, however the preLoad event doesn't appear to trigger again. Hence my web application appears dead in the water until it receives a browser initiated http request. The same seems to be true when I push a new deployment over an existing deployment using a remote MS Deploy. I'm guessing that is effectively the same as a manual update to the web.config, but also typically deploys new dlls which I imagine would have a comparable behavior, but I haven't yet tried that case as well.
So, I'm wondering if anyone has explicitly seen preLoad firing after a manual modification to the web.config, in which case I'll start trying to figure out what configuration I may have wrong. Or is this a short coming of the IIS module? Or am I misunderstanding how it is expected to work?
Thanks.
Pete