C# console app to send email at scheduled times

Question

I\'ve got a C# console app running on Windows Server 2003 whose purpose is to read a table called Notifications and a field called \"NotifyDateTime\" and send an email when

Answer 1

Your first choice is the correct option in my opinion. Task Scheduler is the MS recommended way to perform periodic jobs. Moreover it's flexible, can reports failures to ops, is optimized and amortized amongst all tasks in the system, ...

Creating any console-kind app that runs all the time is fragile. It can be shutdown by anyone, needs an open seesion, doesn't restart automatically, ...

The other option is creating some kind of service. It's guaranteed to be running all the time, so that would at least work. But what was your motivation?

"It seems like because I have the notification date/times in the database that there should be a better way than re-running this thing every hour."

Oh yeah optimization... So you want to add a new permanently running service to your computer so that you avoid one potentially unrequired SQL query every hour? The cure looks worse than the disease to me.

And I didn't mention all the drawbacks of the service. On one hand, your task uses no resource when it doesn't run. It's very simple, lightweight and the query efficient (provided you have the right index).

On the other hand, if your service crashes it's probably gone for good. It needs a way to be notified of new e-mails that may need to be sent earlier than what's currently scheduled. It permanently uses computer resources, such as memory. Worse, it may contain memory leaks.

I think that the cost/benefit ratio is very low for any solution other than the trivial periodic task.