CRM uses NTLM authentication, so you can’t just pull down a page using any simple thing.

Luckily, “curl” is a nice command-line tool for loading webpages that supports NTLM.

The only tricky part is, not all builds support the “--ntlm” and ”-u :” features you need for NTLM to work.  The Win32 Generic 7.21.2 binary build at http://curl.haxx.se/download.html is working for me (the MSVC build supports ntlm but “-u :” silently doesn’t work. You can tell it failed because you get back a 401.)

So, I now put a copy of curl in my project’s references folder, and have added to my post-build events that bounce IIS:

SETLOCAL ENABLEDELAYEDEXPANSION
set URL=http://localcrm/orgname/loader.aspx

. . .

set loop=0
:TRYCURL
rem Load front page to get app pool started up again
set /a loop=%loop%+1
echo Loading site to initialize app pool %URL%
rem curl should use --ntlm -u : to pull user from the environment.
"$(SolutionDir)\references\curl\curl" --user-agent "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; en-US)" --location --location-trusted --ntlm -u : --silent --show-error -w"%%{http_code}" "%URL%"  > NUL
if !ERRORLEVEL! NEQ 0 GOTO CURLFAIL
goto DONE
:CURLFAIL
if %LOOP% LEQ 4 GOTO TRYCURLSLEEP
goto FAIL
:TRYCURLSLEEP
echo sleeping before retry
sleep 1
goto TRYCURL
:DONE
echo OK at %TIME%