Question

I’m writing a windows service to execute some method every x minutes, but I want the method to execute synchronously relative to the timer itself. The windows service have a Timer object (System.Timers.Timer) which starts and calls some method ‘DoWork’ every x minutes, but the timer must ‘stop’ while ‘DoWork’ is executing and starts again after the method is finished.

I’m aware that using the System.Windows.Forms.Timer class would give me the behavior I want, but I don’t want to add a System.Windows.Forms dll reference to my Service project.

Here is an example of ‘working’ code:

    private System.Timers.Timer timer1;

    public void MainMethod()
    {
        timer1 = new System.Timers.Timer();
        timer1.Interval = 1000;
        timer1.Elapsed += new ElapsedEventHandler(timer1_Elapsed);
        timer1.Start();
    }

    void timer1_Elapsed(object sender, ElapsedEventArgs e)
    {
        timer1.Stop();
        DoWork();
        timer1.Start();
    }

    private void DoWork()
    {
        Thread.Sleep(2000);
        Console.WriteLine("found!");
    }

Running above in a console application (as a mockup before writing the windows service), the expected behavior should be for the console to write ‘found!’ every 3 seconds.

Just a side-note: I’m just using ‘Thread.Sleep(2000)’ to mimic a delay but it won’t form part of the actual code base.

Is there any other / “better” way to achieve this than my way above?

Thanks for reading my question and any input would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You can’t use System.Forms.Timer in a windows service because that would require a message pump and Windows services are not given a message pump stack that can be very large (plus you’d have to call Application.Run to start one).

The way you have it now is the way I implement periodic events. I’d add something to monitor whether your events take longer than the period; but other than that…