Question

I’ve been reading up on asynchronous function / web pages for ASP.NET 3.5 (we’re not using v4 yet) but the ones I’ve seen all focus on performing a background task but then still coming back to finish up and send the response, after the task is complete.

What I want to do is simply kick off the background task (in this case a call to a web service) but then return a response to the browser immediately – ie. without waiting for the asynchronous task to complete. I don’t even need to know if it succeeds or not.

What is the best way to do that? I can’t seem to find examples of kicking off what you might call an “orphan” background task in ASP.NET.

I thought of doing it via a javascript Ajax call on the page I show to the user, but the information passed to the web service is sensitive, so that’s out of the question. But that kind of illustrates what I want to do.

[ed] Another idea: Is there an event in the ASP.NET model I can use which occurs after the response has been sent to the browser and the connection closed? ie. So more processing can occur without the user waiting for it?

Answer 1

You can use threads…if you don’t care about the response, just use:

try
{
Thread t = new Thread(new ThreadStart(yourMethodName));
t.Start();
}
catch{}