Tonight's Utah .NET User Group meeting was awesome.  We had a great turnout and had a blast.  We had several new faces too which is always delightful.  Tonight I had the opportunity to present on the topic of Windows Services.  We touched on several aspects of Service creation, debugging, and ultimately created a simple Windows Service that would effectively 'ping' a website to keep it 'hot'.  We didn't take it to the level of 'pinging' the website on a given interval though that would have been easy to do.  Instead, we have the service monitor the website's web.config file.  When the file changes, it pings the website, requesting a designated page.  Essentially, this helps remove the 'first-time' load on the next request when the IIS process recycles.  It could easily be enhanced to monitor a set of user-designated files and keep multiple websites alive and also 'ping' the websites on a given interval.  You can download the source that I created during the presentation here.

All in all, it was a great event and several of us got together at the Denny's on 106th South and I-15 afterwards to hang out and have a good time.  How fun!