Question

I have this code in the asp.net application start evert, and I’m not really familar with the Timer class but what I want to do is have one Trigger that goes off every night at 11 pm, one that goes off at 5:30 in the morning and then every hour after that.

private System.Threading.Timer timer;
protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e)
{

    int intervalMilliseconds = 60 * 1000; 
    timer = new System.Threading.Timer(new System.Threading.TimerCallback(TimedEvent), null, intervalMilliseconds, intervalMilliseconds);
}
protected void Application_End(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    if (timer != null) timer.Dispose();
}
private void TimedEvent(object stateInfo)
{
    MyClass.ExecuteCode();

}

*Please no answers in the way of “don’t use asp.net to do triggers because of the lifecycle”.
*Again – please no posts on what not to use. I’ve received two post both telling me what not to use and both not related to my question which is about the Timer class and how to use it.

Answer 1

From your question i’m assuming you don’t have full control over your hosting environment, so will try to avoid the schedule it… etc answers.

Having said that, you still need to be aware of the asp.net lifecycle, and your trigger approach is fraught with dangers.

Do you get enough traffic that the application won’t end unexpectedly? Do you know the configuration of IIS, so recycling is not a worry?

I can see three approaches:

I would recommend having a page, which uses some sort of key, which is only known
by the caller. Have this page triggered by a watchmouse (See: http://www.watchmouse.com/en/), or scheduled crawler on a pc/server which will always be on, at the times you need it to be triggered.

An alternative would be to trigger a database process, which runs when needed to.
Depending on your environment, this can be scheduled too.

Another would be to check a log file, on users accessing the page, and if it is the first access within the hour, trigger your process. (Do this for whatever period you need.)
However this depends entirely on how heavily your site is accessed, and may not work reliably.