Scheduled Job

  • Thread starter Thread starter Sathian T
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Sathian T

Hello,
Can any body suggest a good solution in VB or in .Net for the following?

We need to send out mails ( 3 different mails having different schedules )
on a scheduled basis for which schedules should be maintained through our
custom intranet application.
What would be the best option? Does anybody has a readymade solution for
this whio can share with us?

Development environment are :
ASP.NET , IIS, SQL Server 2000 , C#

the options we thought are :

1 SQL server scheduled jobs. We cannot have a Mail profile in the server. In
this scenario, would this be possible? Here we loose the control as
maintanance may be difficult as it is independent of our intranet
application where the scheduling actually happning... Any suggestion?

2 Web Services .. We got a information that Web Servicess cannot run its own
but needs to have another component which consumes the Web Services Object.
Not much of idea in this case too... Any goos suggestion ?

3 Windows services : Developers here suggests against it as it could be
difficult for the maintanance. But workable. Has anybody done such kind of
Windows Programming ? can give us any idea on this?

Can anybody suggests the merits and demerits of it ?? Any other approach
could be a solution for this problem?

Any help in this regard would highly helpful for us ..

Regards

Sathian
 
Hi Sathian,

This is not a "ready-made solution" as you put it, however I would suggest
the following...

- Implement a GUI/HTML front-end in your intranet application which users
can use for creating scheduling records. The records are stored to a custom
table in SQL Server (normal n-tier functionality).

- Write a C#.NET Windows Service that periodically polls this custom table
in SQL Server, and sends out the emails when it finds a schedule record whose
time period is up.

- Install the service on any of your Windows servers...

NB: polling is not usually a scalable option, however it sounds like in your
case you don't have that many users?

Have a look at the following article/sample code to help you with writing a
timer-based Windows service - it's written in VB.NET (not my choice :-)
personally) but it shouldn't be too difficult to convert to C#...

http://www.developerfusion.com/show/3441/1/

Hope this helps...

Patrick
 
Another option you might wish to consider is BLAT http://www.blat.net/

BLAT is a command line email tool which you could put into a batch file and
then invoke using the Windows Scheduled Task tool..

Richard Rosenheim
 
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