How do you start a web application from a test project in Visual Studio?

We have a web application which we want to test automatically. In order to have well known data at the start of each run of the test suite, the application restores the database from a snapshot when it starts in test mode. To test the site, we can do this:
Start the web application (running in Visual Studio)
Wait for the web application to be ready
Run the tests in our test project.

How can we do this automatically?