Scheduling Routines

[Jenova]

Hi all,

I’m in need of help in relation to scheduling tasks in VB.NET. I’m developing a File Backup Utility in VB.NET and one important aspect of the application is allowing the user to specify a time as to when the backup will run. I have written the backup routine and it works perfectly, however, the main problem is calling this routine at a specific time. I’ve looked into using Timers; however, I have read that using them can be inefficient. Can anyone shed some light on how I might be able to achieve this?

Kind regards,



Jenova

[mbutler755]

There has been a lot of talk on this over the years. To use the timer, your program would have to be constantly running and the timer would use system resources. There are solutions out there to avoid this, but most people end up recommending the Task Scheduler that's built into Windows. I use this method in one of my backup programs.

I use a switch when I call the executable to tell it that I will be performing an unattended backup so no user interaction is required. Now, that's all we do. I hope this helps.

[Jenova]

Thank you for your reply . I did consider the Windows task scheduler but I have no experience in using it but I'll have to look into this further. Also, I felt I should check to see if there are any other known ways of scheduling routines apart from the aforementioned two.

[incidentals]

if you are going to use the windows scheduler its a good idea to set the close after x minutes value to stop a non functioning program from hogging the machine!

another good idea is to make the job "show" when its working, it makes the users appriaciate its there and helps to get a feel for when a problem has arisen, as the only way to know if a task has failed is to open the scheduler and look!

hope you get on with it... I have a recurring problem in an authority machine where the user associated with the schedule has to keep changing there password on the network and often forgets to update the task as well!