How to force startup of WCF service
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I have an IIS hosted WCF service, and a client Windows application which, upon the first use of the day, takes a while to respond to the first service call. I believe this to be because IIS shuts down services which are not used for a period of time *(and the delay is the restart time for the service)*. I was wondering whether I could alleviate this by making an asynch call when my application starts up *(just to, potentially, get the service to start)*. I therefore, upon application start, created a "fire and forget" background thread which just opens a connection to the service. The intention being that when my application has finished its own startup, and wants to use the WCF service, the thread will *(probably)* have finished and the service startup delay will not be encountered by the user.

Is this reasonable ? Is opening a channel to the WCF service enough, on its own, to start the service, or do I need to write some dummy method and call that ?

Thanks

Ross