Chillisoft Blog
 

The following code provides a workaround that allows you to simulate a scheduled service in your ASP.NET web application.  This is useful for running routine tasks like a scheduled email or file cleanup.

Original credit for the concept goes to Omar Al Zabir, who posted an article on CodeProject at: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/aspnet/ASPNETService.aspx.   An improvement was posted by the user “dselkirk”, and the following code is a slightly simplified C# adaptation.  See the article for an explanation of how the code works.
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The search for a simple way to achieve this turned out to be a study in how to get yourself out of a straight-jacket. The more I read, the more perplexed I became. Of course, this kind of problem is intrinsic to the weaknesses and limitations of web interfaces, and frankly, I can’t wait for Web 2.0, AJAX and Silverlight to change the way we do web. Form programming is so much easier and more intuitive than the hoops we jump through on the web front.
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Just a word of caution with using ASP.NET’s RadioButtonList.  I was adding radio items at code level, creating a RadioButtonList object, then creating individual RadioButtons and adding them to the list’s controls.  Firstly, a RadioButtonList is not composed of RadioButtons, but of ListItems.  Secondly, you don’t add the ListItems to list.Controls, you add it to list.Items.  After that it works fine - have fun!

I was highly amused when I scrolled to the bottom of one of my favourite websites today.  There was a typical Goodle ad block.  Four lines of advertised links as per usual.  But hey?  What were those two little symbols in the bottom left?  Only one would highlight when I hovered over it.  Oh arrows… so I clicked on it and sure enough a new set of ads appeared and now the reverse had a mouse-over colour change too.

I sat there in disbelief: did Google really think this would expose people to more adverts?  Who in their right mind would want to see more advertising and go clicking on those arrows?  And then I realised what I had just done.

I’ll be honest up front and say I haven’t studied this problem a lot, and much of what I know is from heresay and office chatter.  Essentially, we have a reasonable grasp on how to test the logic and data sections of our projects, but testing the user interfaces has been something of a grey area.  We’ve given some thought to this whole problem, and no doubt the industry in general has too.
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