Keyvan Nayyeri

In the first part of this short post series about building a task scheduler system for the ASP.NET I covered some principles as well as the structure of a Task class that represents a particular task.

The other element of the process is of course building a mechanism to schedule this task and start or stop it. This is the topic of the current post. Don’t forget to read the footer notes of this post that have some good news related to this topic.

Before following the post, just let me point that the value of a scheduling system that just depends on the ASP.NET application and works for all the environments and security settings is something obvious. As I pointed in the first post, there are lots of other methods that usually require access to the server resources and depend on other tools but an integrated solution is %100 integrated and simple to use and extend.

The second step in the process is creating a class, say TaskScheduler, that schedules the Task class.

Below code is the simple implementation of this class. It doesn’t have anything except an initialization method that initializes the Task class with the appropriate timer interval and a file path and provides two public methods to start the task or stop it!

As you see, the implementation is pretty simple and straightforward but in real world scenarios you need to extend this in order to start and stop a list of tasks based on dynamic configuration. The core idea and mechanism is constant, though!

But the last step to make this work for your ASP.NET application is creating an instance of the TaskSheduler class and call its StartTask and StopTask methods appropriately. Based on your requirements you may choose from different options but the most common way is using the Applicaiton_Start and Application_End events of the Global application class. You can create an instance of the TaskScheduler class in Application_Start event and call the StartTask and also call the StopTask method in Application_End event.

Now if I start the application and view a page then this task starts running and creates and updates my text file with the current time on a regular basis.

This was a simple implementation of such a task scheduler system in ASP.NET in a practical way. You can download the source code sample for this post series from here.

But after getting Dave’s comment on the first post and noticing the demand for having a general framework for task scheduling in ASP.NET applications, I finally decided to share my own task scheduler system with the community through an open source project. I’ve had a short conversation with Dave and will create a new open source project to release my scheduler publicly with contributions from him to let everyone enjoy using a general mechanism with dynamic configuration like what you see in Community Server. At the moment I’m busy with some stuff but hopefully will do this during the next week and will announce the project here. I also have some plans to contribute this system to some .NET blogging engines like BlogEngine.NET and Subtext.