asp.net - Is there a way to run a process every day in a .Net web application without writing a windows service or SQL server jobs

Question

We require that in a ASP.Net application, a .Net process should be invoked every day at a specified time automatically. This process needs to interact with the database (SQL Server 2005) and generate billing on a daily basis. We are using a shared hosting hence we are not able to create a windows service or create SQL Server jobs. How can this be achieved without user intervention?

Answer 1

You could try the technique described here, used at StackOverflow itself (or at least it was used here at one point). In a nutshell:

1. At startup, add an item to the HttpRuntime.Cache with a fixed expiration.
2. When cache item expires, do your work, such as WebRequest or what have you.
3. Re-add the item to the cache with a fixed expiration.

To get it to run at a specific time instead of an interval, you could lower the interval and simply modify your working method to check the time itself.

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As the comments in the original article linked above note, this isn't a perfect solution, and no one should prefer it over a proper scheduling technique if one is available. See When Does Asp.Net Remove Expired Cache Items? for some additional qualifications.