Questions about a Windows Service that is mostly idle

Question

I have a Windows Service that is meant to run a 2-minute job once a day. The remaining 23:58 of the day, it just sits around looking pretty.

My question relates firstly to the idle time: is it better to use a Timer.Tick, or a Thread.Sleep? Is there any difference between the resources either of these use?

Secondly, during that idle time, if someone shuts down the Windows Service, do I need to interrupt those idle threads for the program to shut down cleanly, or will the Shutdown handle it for me?

Thirdly, am I barking up the wrong tree by using a Windows Service? It would seem to make sense to put a record into the Windows Task Scheduler, but I couldn't find any way to do that using InstallShield, which is what we're using to deploy our product. Any better ideas?

Answer 1

If you start a background thread with ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem I think you could have a Thread.Sleep in there and when you shut the service down you would not have to do anything with it. I think Timer Tick would automatically do the thread creation for you when it ticks, so you would have to do even less if you used that (out of the two the timer tick would, I think match what you want to achieve better so would be the better choice).

This definately feels like something that would be better done by a scheduler like you say though. I don't know if you can do it directly within InstallShield but perhaps you could create a little console app that you run from the installer that based on a command line argument either talks to the windows task schedular API - http://msdn.microsoft.com/enus/library/windows/desktop/aa383614(v=vs.85).aspx to register itself or does the job you want to acheive (i.e -install - set it up on the schedular, no args do whatever it is you need to do once a day).

I think it is a C++ API so you could do a bit of p/invoke or, better, just have some managed C++ in a class libaray and reference it from a c# based console application.