How to Schedule a task in Azure Worker role

Question

Below code demonstrates my Azure Worker role running that performs a task every day at 12 PM:

public override void Run()
{
    try
    {
        while (true)
        {
              int time = Convert.ToInt32(DateTime.Now.TimeOfDay);
              if (time == 12)
              {
                   DoSomethingElse();
              }
        }

    }
    catch (Exception ex)
    {
        Log.Add(ex, true);
    }            
}

Here DoSomethingElse() is a method to send an email at every day 12 PM, and also fires once and only once per day.

How can I implement a scheduler that fire when the time is 12PM and execute DoSomethingElse()? And is this code the best method to use or should I use any 3rd party tool?

Answer 1

You can simply have a message on Azure Queue that is time-delayed to not show up until noon. This also helps deal with multi-instance scenarios: If you're running two instances of your role, you don't want the same scheduled task running twice, so you need a way to have only one of those instances execute this code. This is easily handled via queue message, or you could run scheduler code on a single instance by using something like a blob lease as a mutex.