Best practices for cron job style tasks on the ASP.NET MVC / Azure platform?

Question

Every day, I want to email all my users who have signed up, but not completed a specific task.

What is the best framework for approaching this problem on the .NET MVC / Windows Azure platform?

Coming from OS/Linux world I would write a program and schedule it to run daily via crontab.

Answer 1

You could leverage the scheduled task component of Azure Mobile Services to achieve this outcome and write the code to achieve it using node.js (see: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/mobile/tutorials/schedule-backend-tasks/) It's possible to add other npm packages so you are limited to what's already deployed to Azure so you could hopefully find a library to do the mail sending for you. The only thing you'd need to think about is reliable mail delivery which on Azure typically means using SendGrid to avoid spam blackists.

Answer 2

You can find more information about the scheduler jobs in here.

http://gauravmantri.com/2013/11/10/windows-azure-scheduler-service-part-i-introduction/

http://gauravmantri.com/2013/11/10/windows-azure-scheduler-service-part-ii-managing-cloud-services/

Answer 3

At least for the scheduling part, you could look into Windows Azure Scheduler Service announced not too long ago. Using this service, you would be able to invoke a HTTP/HTTPS web endpoint of write a message to a queue on a scheduled interval.

For sending emails, you would still need to write a program. You could host this program as a cloud service running as a worker role or you could write that logic in a web application and host it as a Windows Azure Website.

Answer 4

Azure just added the ability to schedule jobs. Currently in "Preview"