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So, this question has been asked lots, and i have seen many different answers, but nothing finite or absolute for my scenario.

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What I want to do:

We have a website, with a community of users.

In the admin section of the website, there are buttons to run the following functions:

Email all the users our weekly newsletter [Thursday 4pm],

message users that day's information [Daily 6pm],

post to facebook through facebook connect [Daily 8am and 6pm],

etc, etc. (There will be new requirements coming soon too, but they will follow the same principal)

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All I want to do is to run these functions automatically, so a member of staff does not need to go to the website, login, then click each of the buttons at the set times.

That is, effectively, have the server click these buttons automatically, at the set times mentioned above.

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I have seen suggestions for building a service with a timer built in, which will call each function, or use windows task scheduler, build an exe / com etc, but i get the gut feeling it should not be this complicated.

We have the code already written to actually do the tasks in a .net web page, and using some custom built classes etc.

I just do not know how to automatically call these functions at the desired times.

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Server Info: Dedicated server running Windows Web Server 2008 R2 (64bit)

Development Enviro: Visual Studio 2010 SP1, using .NET 4.0

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Thank you in advance for your help.

Kindest Regards,

Del

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4 Answers 4

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Splitting out the code into separate exes/dlls that can be called from the Windows task scheduler as well as your application is the way to go.

There's no sense in re-inventing a scheduler inside your application when one exists in the operating system you are running on. Particularly as your application is a web application which should be doing web things not server things.

The added advantage is that you have made your application more modular and easier to upgrade.

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+1 and as @DavidNelson said, user1324663 is actually making the application more complex by trying to avoid built in tools.
Heya everybody, that was some quick responses. I am not ruling out any method or tool. I am just not sure which one, or combination of ones, to use. We have a business service dll with the actual method to be called in it, and we have various web services to populate our iphone apps. This is something i have been puzzled with for a while - maybe a case of wood and trees???
so it looks like i should use task scheduler and set up a task for each function i want to fire. But what does the task actually fire/action? It says program/script. Does that point to a dll or to a web service, or something else? It needs to be secure so other / random people cannot call the task!
@user1324663 - it's an exe. You can require a username and password and supply them via the scheduler.
task scheduler calling a console app it is...! Thanks for all ur help people. Much appreciated!
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By definition, web servers respond to requests. This fundamental design manifests in all kinds of ways, such as application pools being shut down after a period of inactivity. For this reason, it is not a good idea to execute time-dependent code inside the context of a web server, because it is difficult to guarantee that the code will actually run (without jumping through a lot of hoops that have other negative side effects). Instead, an external time-dependent mechanism should send a request to the web server to execute these functions.

You said that you didn't want to use Windows Scheduler or write an external exe because "it shouldn't be this complicated"; but I don't see what's complicated about having a scheduled task call a web service.

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Well, though I agree with other answers cheering for windows task scheduler and that website has nothing to do with scheduling tasks (it can be the source of input parameters, not the task runner itself), you could try using scheduling library like quartz.NET to schedule and run your necessary processes in the background.

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Download cURL - a command-line HTTP request utility. Use this utility from task scheduler to call your web page / web service with the specific query string required to execute your functions.

http://curl.haxx.se/

This isnt very secure - anyone that knew the correct query string could cause these functions to execute - but it gives you the general idea. In my opinion its much safer to write a console app that uses your assemblies to directly execute your functionality. Call the console app from task scheduler.

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