Seems Microsoft added a little command line tool for pre-compiling ASP.NET applications
in ASP.NET 2.0.

Nice not to have to write a little app that fires up a bunch of threads and does a
lot of WebRequest.GetUrl() calls just to hit all the ASP.NET pages after deployment
in the production environment. Plus it seems to be able to simplify ”X-Copy” deployment
a great deal. You can pre-compile to a given directory and then X-copy that one.

aspnet_compiler
-p ”C:\MyDevelopment\WebSite1” -v / C:\Staging

Tough I prefer and recommend that you let NAnt do
the job och compiling and coping the right files to the stage directory.

Read more about ASP.NET 2.0 pre-compiling here.

Update 2005-10-27
Seems liked I jumped the gun a little with the nant thing, I don’t get it
to work with asp.net 2.0 (any ideas how, please drop me a mail). Though I stick to
my guns in promoting a build tool, so MSBuild probably
will get the job done.