Restart a WCF service after a server reboot

Question

Is there some mechanism in WCF that can be used to "pre-start / warm-up" WCF services that are hosted in IIS ? - something like the warm-up scripts for SharePoint sites

I have the situation where servers are re-booted over night and next day there is a long delay while the WCF services spin-up. I can't change the time-out in various applications that use the services, so the first users are reporting errors in the morning when they go to use their applications

This is on Windows 2003 Server and IIS 6.0, so the IIS Application Pool Warm-Up Module, http://www.iis.net/download/applicationwarmup, as that's for IIS 7.5

Answer 1

WCF services should be instantly ready when they start. Just make sure the services are set to automatically start when the server boots.

Answer 2

I know you will don't like the answer and I think I repeat myself because it is not the first time I'm posting it. The way to warm-up anything in IIS prior to version 7.5 is using scheduled console application to ping your web site / services and wram them up. It is ugly solution but it works, it is easy and I saw it on every project which had to deal with this requirement.