ScottGu: Auto-Start ASP.NET Applications (VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Series)

"Today’s post covers a small, but nice, new feature that you can now optionally take advantage of with ASP.NET 4 - the ability to automatically startup and proactively initialize a web application without having to wait for an external client to hit the web server. This can help you provide a faster response experience for the first user who hits the server, and avoids you having to write custom scripts to “warm up” the server and get any data caches ready."