I have a application that will allow a user to upload a file. After the upload is complete there are a number of processing steps that must be done on the server (decompression, storage, validation, etc …) thus the user will be informed sometime later by email when everything is complete.
I have seen a number of examples where the BackGroundWorker from System.ComponentModel is used to allow asynchronous work to be done in another thread. However, it seems like they lead to the user eventually getting a response. In our case no web response is necessary – the code can take up to 30 minutes to complete.
Is there another way to start a completely separate thread/process that will keep running even after the user completely closes their session?
If there is no need to respond immediately, you want to offload to some other process to do the heavy lifting. I would dump it in a DB, folder or post to a Message Queue. The worker processes (Windows Services?) would process the files, reading from the db, file system or queue. When the work is done, your worker process can call out to your ASP app (webhook style) if it needs to know when it’s done. Just a suggestion.