How might I schedule a C# Windows Service to perform a task daily?

Question

I have a service written in C# (.NET 1.1) and want it to perform some cleanup actions at midnight every night. I have to keep all code contained within the service, so what's the easiest way to accomplish this? Use of Thread.Sleep() and checking for the time rolling over?

Answer 1

I wouldn't use Thread.Sleep(). Either use a scheduled task (as others have mentioned), or set up a timer inside your service, which fires periodically (every 10 minutes for example) and check if the date changed since the last run:

private Timer _timer; private DateTime _lastRun = DateTime.Now.AddDays(-1);  protected override void OnStart(string[] args) {     _timer = new Timer(10 * 60 * 1000); // every 10 minutes     _timer.Elapsed += new System.Timers.ElapsedEventHandler(timer_Elapsed);     _timer.Start();     //... }   private void timer_Elapsed(object sender, System.Timers.ElapsedEventArgs e) {     // ignore the time, just compare the date     if (_lastRun.Date < DateTime.Now.Date)     {         // stop the timer while we are running the cleanup task         _timer.Stop();         //         // do cleanup stuff         //         _lastRun = DateTime.Now;         _timer.Start();     } } 

Answer 2

Check out Quartz.NET. You can use it within a Windows service. It allows you to run a job based on a configured schedule, and it even supports a simple "cron job" syntax. I've had a lot of success with it.

Here's a quick example of its usage:

// Instantiate the Quartz.NET scheduler var schedulerFactory = new StdSchedulerFactory(); var scheduler = schedulerFactory.GetScheduler();  // Instantiate the JobDetail object passing in the type of your // custom job class. Your class merely needs to implement a simple // interface with a single method called "Execute". var job = new JobDetail("job1", "group1", typeof(MyJobClass));  // Instantiate a trigger using the basic cron syntax. // This tells it to run at 1AM every Monday - Friday. var trigger = new CronTrigger(     "trigger1", "group1", "job1", "group1", "0 0 1 ? * MON-FRI");  // Add the job to the scheduler scheduler.AddJob(job, true); scheduler.ScheduleJob(trigger);