Home/ Questions/Q 3324036
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-17T23:22:25+00:00

I am working on a Windows service which needs to schedule tasks whenever one

  • 0

I am working on a Windows service which needs to schedule tasks whenever one of it’s web services is called. This could happen hundreds of times per second in a worst case scenario. The task needs to wait a period of time, typically a minute or two, then call a method passing a parameter.

We tried to build our own scheduler class to do this:

public void ScheduleTask<T>(TimeSpan delay, Action<T> task, T arg)
{
    Thread.Sleep(delay);
    threadPool.ExecuteAsync(task, arg);
}

But we figured this wouldn’t be appropriate because we could theoretically end up with hundreds of Thread Pool threads all waiting. I am under the impression that there is a finite number of Thread Pool threads available and that this could potentially lock up the system.

I then turned to Quartz.NET and read on their features page that:

Job class instances can be instantiated by Quartz.NET, or by your application’s framework.

and on page 3 of their tutorial that the Scheduler creates instances of your Job class (not you) and as such:

it does not make sense to have data-members defined on the job class as their values would be ‘cleared’ every time the job executes.

Feel free to yell at me, but how do I get a reference to my Job class instance before it executes so I can set a property on it?

  • The property is doing the job of a
    parameter so i have no interest in it
    after the Job has executed.
  • I also want to minimise the number of
    objects it takes to acheive this to
    keep my code neat and simple.
  • Finally, I seriously dislike using
    Dictionaries so would prefer to avoid the JobDataMap object.
Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I don’t understand exactly what your use case is and why you would need to set a property on the job, but to answer your question: to get access to your job before it executes you need to create a job listener (implement IJobListener). The job listener gets called just before the job gets executed, so you could set a property at that point.

    Some links:
    The documentation on job listeners

    I wrote a blog post detailing the creation of listeners, here.

    • 0