Long-running events in ASP.NET revisited

[greg_smalter]

We’ve had recent discussions about Quartz and background jobs and asynchronous behavior in ASP.NET. This article continues to recommend doing this stuff outside of ASP.NET entirely. This is the same article that tells you not to use the EnableViewStateMac. (Small rant: I especially like how they make it sound like it’s the developer’s fault for setting it to false, when they are the ones that developed a framework that is broken 100% of the time when you use one of the two possible values for the setting they themselves created.)

[samrueby]

I read another article last week that agrees with this: don’t bother with async in ASP.NET. I believe it was a discussion with an actual ASP.NET developer, who basically said they do some flaky stuff to make it work.

[wgross]

And I agree as well. Here’s what I said recently, in response to Hanselman’s post about async work in ASP.NET:

How to run Background Tasks in ASP.NET

I read that shortly after he published it. But right now I don't see much need for any of those tools since I've always just made bulk ops workers and/or Windows services, which have the advantage of being in their own processes in case you need to kill them or something. But I suppose that's also a downside, because they don't share memory with your web app. Anything you need to pass to them needs to first be stored in a database or some other persistent place.