Using Powershell with Application Pools

While developing Web applications and services using IIS, you need to recycle the application once in a while. You could just run iisreset, but sometimes you only want to affect one specific application pool. If you are using IIS7 or later, you could use appcmd.exe, but if you have some legacy then one option would be powershell. For example, to recycle the ASP.NET 4 application pool using powershell, you can run:

# Recycle the ASP.NET 4 application pool
([ADSI] "IIS://localhost/W3SVC/AppPools/ASP.NET v4.0").psbase.invoke("recycle")

# Stop the ASP.NET 4 application pool:
([ADSI] "IIS://localhost/W3SVC/AppPools/ASP.NET v4.0").psbase.invoke("stop")

# Start the ASP.NET 4 application pool:
([ADSI] "IIS://localhost/W3SVC/AppPools/ASP.NET v4.0").psbase.invoke("start")

# Verify the ASP.NET 4 application pool state: 1 = starting, 2 = started, 3 = stopping, 4 = stopped
([ADSI] "IIS://localhost/W3SVC/AppPools/ASP.NET v4.0").AppPoolState

Enjoy!