Question

We have a website that runs on ASP.NET. I would like to run a service that checks the database table every XX hours and do an action ( send mail ) if some conditions are not met.

We cannot use

1. Windows Service as the hosted server is not a dedicated server. (We just have the control panel)
2. SQL Service for sending mail as we are using Access 2003 (mdb) as our database. It resides at App_Data
3. IIS is also not available

Its very critical that we need some kind of polling in the server.
We are kind of stuck now. What are the alternatives we have?

Answer 1

its mentioned here

Easy Background Tasks in ASP.NET

here are some snippets from that link

private static CacheItemRemovedCallback OnCacheRemove = null;

protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    AddTask("DoStuff", 60);
}

private void AddTask(string name, int seconds)
{
    OnCacheRemove = new CacheItemRemovedCallback(CacheItemRemoved);
    HttpRuntime.Cache.Insert(name, seconds, null,
        DateTime.Now.AddSeconds(seconds), Cache.NoSlidingExpiration,
        CacheItemPriority.NotRemovable, OnCacheRemove);
}

public void CacheItemRemoved(string k, object v, CacheItemRemovedReason r)
{
    // do stuff here if it matches our taskname, like WebRequest
    // re-add our task so it recurs
    AddTask(k, Convert.ToInt32(v));
}

Works well in my testing; badges are awarded every 60 seconds like clockwork for all >users – Jeff Atwood