Best way to do a task looping in Windows Service

Question

I have a method that send some SMS to our customers that look like below:

public void ProccessSmsQueue()
{
   SmsDbContext context = new SmsDbContext();
   ISmsProvider provider = new ZenviaProvider();
   SmsManager manager = new SmsManager(context, provider);

   try
   {
      manager.ProcessQueue();
   }
   catch (Exception ex)
   {
      EventLog.WriteEntry(ex.Message, EventLogEntryType.Error);
   }
   finally
   {
      context.Dispose();
   }
}

protected override void OnStart(string[] args)
{
   Task.Factory.StartNew(DoWork).ContinueWith( ??? )
}

So, I have some issues:

1. I don´t know how long it takes for the method run;

2. The method can throw exceptions, that I want to write on EventLog

3. I want to run this method in loop, every 10 min, but only after last execution finish.

How I can achieve this? I thought about using ContinueWith(), but I still have questions on how to build the entire logic.

Answer 1

You should have an async method that accepts a CancellationToken so it knows when to stop, calls ProccessSmsQueue in a try-catch block and uses Task.Delay to asynchronously wait until the next time it needs to run:

public async Task DoWorkAsync(CancellationToken token)
{
    while (true)
    {
        try
        {
            ProccessSmsQueue();
        }
        catch (Exception e)
        {
            // Handle exception
        }
        await Task.Delay(TimeSpan.FromMinutes(10), token);
    }
}

You can call this method when your application starts and Task.Wait the returned task before existing so you know it completes and has no exceptions:

private Task _proccessSmsQueueTask;
private CancellationTokenSource _cancellationTokenSource;

protected override void OnStart(string[] args)
{
    _cancellationTokenSource = new CancellationTokenSource();
    _proccessSmsQueueTask = Task.Run(() => DoWorkAsync(_cancellationTokenSource.Token));
}

protected override void OnStop()
{
    _cancellationTokenSource.Cancel();
    try
    {
        _proccessSmsQueueTask.Wait();
    }
    catch (Exception e)
    {
        // handle exeption
    }
}