How To Run A Timer On Specific Time Interval

Introduction

This blog demonstrates, how to run a timer on the specific time interval, using System.Threading.Timer class. This will help the developer to execute a task on the certain time interval. This blog starts with the simple declaration of Timer and will execute a method with a console message printing.

Step 1: Create a new console Application with the name “Threading_Timer” and declare the ‘ _timer’ of type System.Threading.Timer and a local variable ‘count’ of type int globally.

Declaration of Timer and a local variable of type int

//Declare a _timer of type System.Threading
private static Timer _timer;
//Local Variable of type int
private static int count = 1;

Step 2: Initialize the ‘_timer’ in Main method and call a callback method ‘callTimerMethode()’ to print some message at the timer execution interval, inside this.

//Initialization of _timer
_timer = new Timer(x => { callTimerMethode(); }, null, Timeout.Infinite, Timeout.Infinite);

Step 3: Define callTimerMethode() as following:

/// <summary>
/// This method will print timer executed time and increase the count with 1.
/// </summary>
private static void callTimerMethode()
{
Console.WriteLine(string.Format("Timer Executed {0} times.", count));
count = count + 1;
}

Step 4: Define a method called ‘Setup_Timer()’ to set the timer execution time and change the execution time of the timer on this time interval and call ‘Setup_Timer()’ method in Main method.

/// <summary>
/// This method will set the timer execution time and will change the tick
time of timer.
/// </summary>
private static void Setup_Timer()
{
DateTime currentTime = DateTime.Now;
DateTime timerRunningTime = new DateTime(currentTime.Year, currentTime.Month, currentTime.Day, 2, 0, 0);
timerRunningTime = timerRunningTime.AddDays(15);
double tickTime = (double)(timerRunningTime - DateTime.Now).TotalSeconds;
_timer.Change(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(tickTime), TimeSpan.FromSeconds(tickTime));
}

The method, shown above, will set the timer running time at the interval of every 15 days at 2 AM.

If you want to run the timer after every 2 minutes, just comment these line of code,

//DateTime currentTime = DateTime.Now;
//DateTime timerRunningTime = new DateTime(currentTime.Year, currentTime.Month, currentTime.Day, 2, 0, 0);
//timerRunningTime = timerRunningTime.AddDays(15);

Add the line of code, given below:

DateTime timerRunningTime = DateTime.Now.AddMinutes(2);

Complete Program line of Code

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Threading;
namespace Threading_Timer
{
public class Program
{
//Declare a _timer of type System.Threading
private static Timer _timer;
//Local Variable of type int
private static int count = 1;
static void Main(string[] args)
{
//Initialization of _timer
_timer = new Timer(x => { callTimerMethode(); }, null, Timeout.Infinite, Timeout.Infinite);
Setup_Timer();
Console.ReadKey();
}
/// <summary>
/// This method will print timer executed time and increase the count
with 1.
/// </summary>
private static void callTimerMethode()
{
Console.WriteLine(string.Format("Timer Executed {0}
times.",count));
count=count+1;
}
/// <summary>
/// This method will set the timer execution time and will change the
tick time of timer.
/// </summary>
private static void Setup_Timer()
{
DateTime currentTime = DateTime.Now;
DateTime timerRunningTime = new DateTime(currentTime.Year,
currentTime.Month, currentTime.Day, 2, 0, 0);
timerRunningTime = timerRunningTime.AddDays(15);
//DateTime timerRunningTime = DateTime.Now.AddMinutes(2);
double tickTime = (double)(timerRunningTime –
DateTime.Now).TotalSeconds;
_timer.Change(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(tickTime),
TimeSpan.FromSeconds(tickTime));
}
}
}

The output looks, as shown in Figure 1:

output

Summary

In this blog, I discussed, how we can set the execution time of a method, using “System.Threading.Timer” class. I think this will help a developer to execute a specific task at a specified time interval.