http://ayende.comAyende @ RahienCopyright (C) Ayende Rahien 2004 - 2021 (c) 202660Sasha, Yes, I noticed. It also has a far richer semantics for the scheduling itself. Pretty neat stuff. http://ayende.com/2943/not-invented-here-useful-noneteless#comment10http://ayende.com/2943/not-invented-here-useful-noneteless#comment10Mon, 12 Nov 2007 09:46:56 GMTNote that Vista and Server 2008 come with an enhanced Task Scheduler (informally called "Task Scheduler 2.0"). It's still COM-based, but the type library is very .NET friendly - just add a reference and you're ready to whip some code. What I liked the most about the new model is the ability to create custom task handlers, which are essentially COM DLLs hosted in the COM surrogate process (dllhost.exe). The custom task handlers feature the ability to pause, resume and stop the task at will, report progress and report task completion, making it even more useful for administrators. By the way, the UI is much cooler too, I think admins are going to love it. http://ayende.com/2943/not-invented-here-useful-noneteless#comment9http://ayende.com/2943/not-invented-here-useful-noneteless#comment9Mon, 12 Nov 2007 08:26:47 GMTJohn, Yes, they run it in a thread, although a process execution is not really hard to add. I don't believe there is a chance of a task throwing exception and corrupting the state of the scheduler, it is one of those things that they handle. It is possible for a rogue task to do weird things to the process, like lower its priority or some such stuff, but in general, it is not really the case. A rogue process can do much the same damage. http://ayende.com/2943/not-invented-here-useful-noneteless#comment8http://ayende.com/2943/not-invented-here-useful-noneteless#comment8Mon, 12 Nov 2007 08:15:23 GMTI had a bad experience with the task scheduler... I don't know how much work u plan to use it for but we used it for quite a lot of tasks that happens only once and it didn't scale. Finally we wrote a specific solution for this scenario. http://ayende.com/2943/not-invented-here-useful-noneteless#comment7http://ayende.com/2943/not-invented-here-useful-noneteless#comment7Mon, 12 Nov 2007 07:57:49 GMTI'll just add that creating a new process is a desireable feature, especially since it allows you to run tasks with different user identies (i.e., lowest-priviledge). And it makes the job of the scheduling system to shut down a runaway task (as the windows scheduler does) much easier. How did the other 2 in-process systems do this? Running them on a thread? And how do they deal with a task throwing an exception and corrupting the host process's state? http://ayende.com/2943/not-invented-here-useful-noneteless#comment6http://ayende.com/2943/not-invented-here-useful-noneteless#comment6Mon, 12 Nov 2007 07:54:08 GMTI also dont like the use of the windows built in scheduling. To that end we are currently building a scheduler automation system (load balancing, timed triggers, file triggers, email triggers) ... Thanks for the pointers, I had not done a thorough search of what is out there, although at a first glance these components dont seem to cover our needs. Hey, whats so bad with COM, it seems to play nicely, we like it :) What is with the WF solution, I must be missing something... How does hosting the WF designer provide any scheduling automation of tasks? http://ayende.com/2943/not-invented-here-useful-noneteless#comment5http://ayende.com/2943/not-invented-here-useful-noneteless#comment5Mon, 12 Nov 2007 01:50:55 GMTOh dear. I just googled "Quartz.NET" and clicked on the first link. Opps! NSFW! The 2nd and 3rd links are more appropriate :) http://ayende.com/2943/not-invented-here-useful-noneteless#comment4http://ayende.com/2943/not-invented-here-useful-noneteless#comment4Mon, 12 Nov 2007 01:48:02 GMTWe are using WF for tasks which sound like these. I haven't used any of these, I would check these out. But a Workflow sometimes is a more natural way to combine these bits and pieces together into a coherent business process. If only WF designer hosting is out of the beta mode, I would suggest WF. http://ayende.com/2943/not-invented-here-useful-noneteless#comment3http://ayende.com/2943/not-invented-here-useful-noneteless#comment3Mon, 12 Nov 2007 01:23:21 GMTI would love to hear you suggestions for admin UI, what would you expect from it and on which UI platform should it run on? There has been a little discussion on Quartz.NET mailing list about porting the Java Quartz's web admin app to Quartz.NET but no real work done yet. http://ayende.com/2943/not-invented-here-useful-noneteless#comment2http://ayende.com/2943/not-invented-here-useful-noneteless#comment2Mon, 12 Nov 2007 00:31:25 GMTWhat about Windows Workflow Foundation? http://ayende.com/2943/not-invented-here-useful-noneteless#comment1http://ayende.com/2943/not-invented-here-useful-noneteless#comment1Sun, 11 Nov 2007 23:50:23 GMT