Question

I want to develope a delivery application(self hosted WCF service ) which allows scheduling of the emails. User will assign a schedule to email and send it. The WCF service should be able to pick the email and send it on its scheduled time.

What approach shall I use here? I am thinking about following alternatives

1. Use background worker thread to perform this task
2. Any third party scheduling service (I yet to investigate on this)

Can anyone suggest me a possible solution for this apart from above mentioned two?

[Edit] : Can I use SQL Agents for this?

Thanks,

Ram

Answer 1

I saw the “…apart from above mentioned two…” but I think there is nothing else to achieve this 🙂
Either build an infinite loop inside of windows service like this:

private void DoTheThing()
    {
        try
        {
            while (true)
            {
                TheThing e = new TheThing();
                Thread t = new Thread(new ThreadStart(e.Run));
                t.Start();
                Thread.Sleep(1000);
            }
        }
        catch (ThreadAbortException) { }
        catch (Exception ex) { /* Whatever error handling you got */ }
    }

… where TheThing has a method Run which does all that you need every 1 second. This looks silly (while(true) – yeah, right) but has been working non-stop since .NET 1.0 on at least 30 servers 🙂 Just make sure you call this DoTheThing method on Start of your windows service in a new thread.

Hope this helps 🙂