"Out of Band" Processing Techiniques for asp.net applications

Question

Jeff has previously blogged about using the cache to perform "out of band" processing on his websites, however I was wondering what other techniques people are using to process these sorts of tasks?

Answer 1

Windows Service

Answer 2

Years ago, I saw Rob Howard describe a way to use an HttpModule to process tasks in the background. It doesn't seem as slick as using the Cache, but it might be better for certain circumstances.

This blog post has the details, and there are many others that capture the same information if you look around.

Answer 3

You may want to look at how DotNetNuke does it. I know it is written in VB.NET, but I retrofitted the code into C#. I was perusing the source and noticed they had a feature in their admin area to setup scheduled tasks. These tasks get setup thru the admin interface and stored in the database. When the site starts, thru the Global.asax file, they either created another thread to run this service that then runs the scheduled tasks at their scheduled time. I can't remember the exact logic, it's been a while, but it is definitely a good resource on how other people have done out of band processes for Asp.Net applications. This technique still keeps the logic within the Asp.Net application, but it runs out of band in my opinion.