As I have been working on migrating the intranet at the company I work for... I found that the first request of the day (or the first request after a little while) are just bloody slow.  Searching around, I found a tool by GotchaSoft that would "keep" the connection alive by pinging it every "x" minutes.  I was excited and downloaded it, only to find that it wouldn't run -- kept crashing immediately on me.

I downloaded their source, which was missing a lot of proprietary referenced DLLs.  Not too helpful.  I decided to bite the bullet and write my own (which has similar look and feel to theirs).

So, without further ado, here is the DNNRefresh utility which is installed as a Windows Service and has a configuration utility (windows app) that accompanies it.

Click here to get it.

**Instructions**

Run the installation on any computer you want to use this from (it installs as a Windows service).  You can then proceed to configure the application by accessing your program (start) menu, locating "MACU", then "DNNRefresh". 

Manage URLs through the "Edit" menu option.  If your server requires windows authentication (intranet), it provides the capacity for you to enter a username, pw, domain for logging in when pinging the site.  Otherwise, leave those fields blank.

You may manage main settings (ie, refresh interval, URL regular expression validation) via Tools-->Configure.

You can start or stop the service via the Service option (or context menu in the system tray).

While developing my own "menu builder" module for DNN, I attempted to use the UrlControl (ascx) built in to DNN and found it somewhat disappointing in that the only way you could use the control was from a "new" request.  What that means is that so long as I choose to create a new link and not edit it, I'm ok.  The Links module in DNN works ok with it because it loads the link from a new request (not a postback).  However, if I try to do the same thing from a postback, the UrlControl won't like it.

Furthermore, as an ASCX, it was difficult to just drag and drop into whatever project I want... so I decided to create my own Custom Server Control that has all the same functionality.

So here it is: click here to get it