>Al,
>
>>My ASP.NET app draws information from SQL Server to populate dropdown lists etc. This information changes very seldom and is common to all sessions so I'm storing it in datatables in Application state, which are loaded at application start.
>
>Keeping this goal in mind. I don't think you need to restart the application. If you are to give the user an admin page (web form) which can be coded to retrieve the data from your SQL Server and repopulate the DataTables in your Application state so long as you can obtain a reference to the application state variable.

That's an excellent idea which may work very well for this particular application. The only concern I have is that a session already in progress could potentially end up with 2 different versions of the information between different pages, or maybe even in the same page (unlikely but possible)? My (limited) understanding is that an ASP.NET app restart automagically takes care of these kinds of issues.

The site I'm working on will likely be very low transaction volume so I don't think concurrency during a data refresh will be a problem. So, as I said, I think your idea will probably work fine. However, I think there may be (other) circumstances where I might like to force an app restart, so it'd be nice to know if it could be done programmatically.