The first and most important piece our OnRamp is the use of WebActivator to allow us to declare classes that will run either just before or just after the App_Start event of your ASP.NET application, or when your application shuts down. This is accomplished using an assembly level attribute, pointing to a particular static class and method.

Consider the following class declaration from our IoC.cs file:

[assembly: WebActivator.PreApplicationStartMethod(typeof(Templates.App_Start.IoC), "Startup")]
namespace Templates.App_Start
{
    public static class IoC
    {
        public static void Startup()
        {
          // Details here described in the next feature…
        }
    }
}

Note how we declare the PreApplicationStartMethod, and point to the type of Templates.App_Start.IoC and then the "Startup" string lets it know which method to run. This results in our IoC.Startup() method being called before App_Start.

Just as there is PreApplicationStartMethod, there is also PostApplicationStartMethod and ApplicationShutdownMethod, both of which are used in our Logging wire up which will be discussed later.