Question

I have an ASP.NET MVC web application which is hosted by an external provider, on IIS 7.

I wish to run a process every 15 minutes or so, which checks a backlog of emails that need to be sent, and actually sends them.

It seems that the normal way to do this is with Microsoft Message Queue, but since this is a hosted environment which I can’t directly control, I won’t be able to install or configure MSMQ.

So far I’ve decided to do it by appending rows to a table in my SQL Server database (same hosting).

So how should I implement the bit where I check the backlog and send the emails?

Should it be some kind of separate thread in my main web application, which restarts itself every 15 minutes?

Another option I considered was just opening an HTTP-POST interface which, when called with an appropriate admin password, runs an iteration of the email sender.

I could then create a small console app on my local PC which calls the interface every 15 minutes.

The first option is simpler, but the second might be more robust.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Jeff Atwood did a post on how he originally achieved the badge system on Stack Overflow using an expiring cache to reset the process periodically.

https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/07/easy-background-tasks-in-aspnet/

I have done something similar to this in the past sending emails out every day. The service was non essential, and it didn’t matter if the emails missed a day or two, as they would go out eventually anyway, but the system worked quite well. It’s all asp.net so works fine in the hosting environments I use, without access to service on the server or creating a local trigger from your desktop.