Question

I have a clockIn & clockOut module that records start time & end time for workers from an Asp.NET app.

I want to ask how to do cron job for asp.net application to see if a worker has not entered their time on that date or week and send an email notification to remind them to enter start time and end time.

Answer 1

ASP.NET is the wrong tool for the job. You would be better off either writing a Console Application that is run on a scheduled task, or a Windows Service that polls on a regular interval. ASP.NET is purely meant for a request/response model.

Either one can access whatever data store the website is reading from/writing to just as easily as the ASP.NET site can.

If you’ve done neither, the Console Application is by far the simplest to write and implement. Windows Services aren’t all that bad, but involve extra overhead, including difficulty debugging, and the need to go through a special installation process as compared to the XCOPY deployment model possible with Console applications.

If you REALLY want to do it in ASP.NET, you can write an asp.net web page that does this, and use the Windows Scheduled Task to run it. The Scheduled Task can open up Internet Explorer to a specific page just as easily as it can run any executable. But I wouldn’t recommend it. You’ll forever have to close the IE window when the task is finished, and it’s just really a “hackish” solution. I did it back when I was a pure web developer and didn’t know any better, but not since.