Dilbert Blog

Most of the readers of a blog should have read or seen Dilbert. The cartoon engineer whom we all can relate to along with his colleagues all of whom we can relate to again. After being a dilbert fan for a while I started reading Dilbert creator Scott Adams blog. Let me tell you, Scotts blog is n times (n>1) funnier than Dilbert it self. Can u imagine it? Yep..its true.

Dilbert blog has several kinds of entries. What catches me most is Scotts ability to convert a normal situation to an extremely funny one without much effort at all.Some interesting things he talks about are his crazy (yet sounding very much practicle) innovations, question of the day, science and relegion, media, immigration etc...

Out of 100s of useful blogs which can give me loads of knowldege and information I make it a point to read Dilbert Blog each day! You should also subscribe to its RSS here.

DNN Schedulers

Writing scheduled tasks in ASP.Net is not a trivial thing. For a start, I haven't written any. So when we had to design a scheduler for Dot Net Nuke (DNN) it appeared even more daunting. DNN is a portal framework built on top of ASP.Net and its the underneath framework being used for the current project I'm working on.

The problem with ASP.Net scheduling is the fact that the ASP.Net worker process gets recycled every now and then. So once the worker process goes down (shutting down any schedulers with it) it will not be up again until someone hits the web site again.  Someone had also suggested writing windows services which operates independent of ASP.Net as schedulers. The recycling of the worker process is a very important feature in ASP.net which enables the server not to be taken down by runaway applications.  But one downside of this is the impact to the scheduler. But as long as someone is visiting your web site the scheduler will keep on running.

Lucky for me DNN had an inbuilt scheduling engine.  This had almost all the features you would want from a scheduler. It has a easy to implement interface for me write my own scheduling tasks (DotNetNuke.Services.Scheduling.Scheduler interface in DotNetNuke.DNNScheduler.DLL), It has easy to use interfaces for me to configure it and it also provides history views for me to check how my scheduler was performing its tasks.

It was pretty easy for me to implement a simple test scheduler according to DNN documentation. I just have to wait and see what kind of complications could arrive when I implement the real scheduler which is to migrate potential DNN users from a legacy system to the DNN portal on a daily basis.