Timer/Scheduler as a Windows Service in C#

Scott Furr

Hello all,

This is my first post and I have to admit that I am a newbie when it comes to programming in C#. With that being said, please forgive any cluelessness on my part ;)

Let me first state what I am trying to accomplish and then I'll ask my question. I'm trying to create a windows service that will run an event at a scheduled time, similar to the windows task scheduler (which I don't want to use). For example; I want the service to launch notepad every Wednesday at 4PM.

Now for the question. Would this better better suited for a Timer or running a loop that will check the DateTime every minute and compare it to the scheduled time? I would think running a loop like this would eventually cause an unnecessary processor load, but I'm not completely sure how C# manages memory.

FYI... In it's end state, I would like an administrator to be able to change the scheduled time using a separate form or ASP page, so I wouldn't want the code to call a static time like Wednesday at 4PM where a timer is just set with an interval of a week. I'd like the code to be open to the possibility that the admin would want the task to run on multiple days of the week. This is why I'm leaning more toward using a loop that will check DateTime, but I'm leaving it to the experts to guide me :)

Thanks in advance!

Scriptd

6 Replies

Know the answer? Post it — somebody with the same question will find it here.

Ryan Alford18y ago
Accepted answer
here is some sample code:

class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        DateTime now = DateTime.Now;
        Console.WriteLine(string.Format("The current date is: {0}", now));
        Console.WriteLine(string.Format("The day of the week is: {0}", now.DayOfWeek));
        Console.WriteLine(string.Format("The hour is: {0}", now.Hour));
        Console.WriteLine(string.Format("The minute is: {0}", now.Minute));

        Console.ReadLine();
    }
}

you will notice that the "now.Hour" actually returns the hour in 24-hour format. So 3PM would return as 15.

so let's go by an example. Let's say you want to run this on Wednesdays at 5:30PM.

DateTime now = DateTime.Now;

// you would read these from the app.config file
string dayOfWeek = "Wednesday";
int hour = 17;
int minute = 30;

if (dayOfWeek == now.DayOfWeek)
{
    if (now.Hour == hour)
    {
        if (now.Minute == minute)
        {
            // do your code
        }
    }
}
+1
Scott Furr18y ago
Awesome!

Thanks a lot, you've been a great help!
+1
Scott Furr18y ago
This is definitely helping me get on the right track but I'm looking for a code example of how to check for the days, hours, and minutes. All the examples I've seen show years and months and I really don't want that. Can I just eliminate those two options and go straight for the days, hours and minutes?

I REALLY appreciate all the help so far! Thanks!
+1
Ryan Alford18y ago
If you mean set a datetime to a certain date, you can definitely do that using the DateTime contructor. it shouldn't be that difficult. Let's say that you want to do it every Wednesday at 12PM. For the service, it would run every minute(the processing time is very negligible for simply getting a datetime), and check to see what the current day is. If it's Wednesday, it would next check to see what the hour is. If it's 12, then check the minutes. That's just some thoughts from off the top of my head. BTW....sorry if there are no paragraphs. Chrome doesn't like this forum software and it seems to ignore carriage returns.
+1
Scott Furr18y ago
I was thinking of something almost exactly along those lines. So for part 2 of my problem...

I know how to get the current time, but how do I SET a DateTime to compare it so that the service knows that the task is due? I read on another forum that you can't set it, that it's read only in a sense. Am I off base here?
+1
Ryan Alford18y ago
I would say using a loop. Also, using an app.config file would work great for the datetime. Create two projects, one service, and one windows forms/asp.net project. let the forms/asp.net project edit the app.config file, and let the service read it.
+1