Windows Service Application仅执行一次长时间运行的任务，并在完成后自行停止

Question

I am developing a Windows Service Application for sending bulk emails to the customers. In my case, I need to manually start and stop the service from the ASP.Net MVC web application passing some parameters. Since this is on demand and there is no schedule for this activity, I want the service to perform a long-running task (Sending bulk emails to 100K customers) only once, once started and then stop itself once completed.

1. Is this approach correct?
2. If yes, how I could track its progress in MVC application?

Thank You,

Answer 1

This approach is incorrect. A "Windows Service" is a kind of application that waits for some client to call it, or an event to happen. (It is called daemon in Unix/Linux jargon)

In your case, "the service" should be an ordinary program that does batch processing. So, just start a separate process with Process.Start(). It doesn't block anything in your ASP.NET MVC application, it just does its job and terminate.

There are two ways to track the progress. You can call Process objects methods like WaitFor() with a timeout to see if it completes its job. Also, your "service" application would probably write its progress into a file, and the MVC application can read it anytime to see what's happening.