Question

I am developing an application which is web-based (asp.net MVC).
The user configures reminders using the web interface so that other users can be notified when something has to be done, in the future.
I am in the process to develop the scheduler now.
In the past I’ve used windows-services applications for that purpose but I’ve realized that I’ve got too many services now that, basically, don’t do much but run in background every x minutes just to check something and execute some actions.
There’s nothing wrong with that but every service uses a good amount of resources on the server, is not easily configurable (I have to specify most of the parameters in the config file) and (it happened different times) if there’s any kind of problems with the database and it stops I have no way to check to see if it is doing its job.

Are there any other alternatives/suggestion? I’ve seen someone have tried to implement Windows Workflow Foundation but still the host is Windows Service.
What is the best approach for you?

Answer 1

There are two obvious alternatives:

1. Use the standard Windows task scheduler to kick off command-line-driven jobs. Microsoft has really improved the scheduler in Vista and Windows 7.
2. Use a custom-built scheduler like Quartz.NET.