Question

Can a windows service be set to run at a specific time..?

Example

From 8:00 am to 5:00pm run process 
From 5:00 pm to 8:00am run process

This process can run daily, weekly or a single day..

Please let me know, your thoughts

Answer 1

I faced a similar situation where I had to develop a service which would do something only during trading time which is from 11:00 am to 3:00 pm everyday in that specific case. It would remain idle the rest of the day. I am sharing what I did in my case. I am not sure whether it would be helpful for you but I hope that it will be.

Two variables maintaining the starting time and ending time

TimeSpan StartingTime = new TimeSpan(
                             Int32.Parse(
                               ConfigurationManager
                                  .AppSettings["StartingTimeHour"]), 
                             Int32.Parse(
                               ConfigurationManager
                                   .AppSettings["StartingTimeMinute"]), 0);
TimeSpan EndingTime = new TimeSpan(
                             Int32.Parse(
                               ConfigurationManager
                                   .AppSettings["EndingTimeHour"]), 
                             Int32.Parse(
                               ConfigurationManager
                                   .AppSettings["EndingTimeMinute"]), 0);
//Starting time and Ending time may change in future. So I used app.config 
//instead of fixing them to (11,0,0) and (15,0,0) respectively

A method to check whether it is trading time

public bool TradingTime()
{                        
    TimeSpan CurrentTime = DateTime.Now.TimeOfDay;
    return ((CurrentTime > StartingTime) && (CurrentTime < EndingTime));            
}

Then where it is necessary to check the time and execute something depending on that:

while (TradingTime())
{
    //do whatever required
}