Archive

Posts Tagged ‘VFS’

Lightweight Task Scheduling Library for .NET / Silverlight

January 9th, 2010

I’m currently working on VFS, a virtual file system. For running transfers, VFS internally maintains locks that do have expiration time. Accordingly, I found myself in need for a job scheduling mechanism in order to properly release expired locks. I looked around for a few alternatives, but eventually ended up writing my own lightweight version.

Features:

  • Simple scheduling and callback mechanisms
  • Silverlight compatible
  • Lightweight
  • Fluent API
  • Detection of system time changes with optional rescheduling
  • Optional forwarding of exceptions during job execution
  • Open Source (Ms-PL)

 

Download library and sample

Current Version: 1.0.2, 2010.01.12

 

What Does it Do?

Basically, the library allows you to create a job, and submit that job to a scheduler, along with a callback action. This callback action is invoked as soon (or every time) the job is due.

Before going into the details, here’s a first code snippet that creates a simple Job that is supposed to run repeatedly (every 1.5 seconds) for a minute. Once the job is created, it is submitted to a Scheduler instance which processes the job and makes sure the submitted callback action is being invoked every time the job is due:

private Scheduler scheduler = new Scheduler();

public void RunOnce()
{
  //define a start / end time
  DateTime startTime = DateTime.Now.AddSeconds(5);
  DateTime endTime   = startTime.AddSeconds(60);

  //configure the job
  Job consoleJob = new Job();
  consoleJob.Run.From(startTime)
                .Every.Seconds(1.5)
                .Until(endTime);

  //submit the job with the callback to be invoked
  scheduler.SubmitJob(consoleJob, j => Console.Out.WriteLine("hello world"));
}

 

Silverlight

The project provides class libraries for .NET 3.5 and Silverlight 3, along with a Silverlight sample application that shows how to add scheduling functionality to your SL application with just a few lines of code.

While long-term scheduling isn’t probably something you need to do in a Silverlight application, the scheduler simplifies the management of periodic jobs, such as polling a server for updates. Below is a snippet from the Silverlight sample application. This job starts immediately, and runs indefinitely with an interval of 2 seconds:

private void CreateJob2()
{
  //create job
  Job<int> job = new Job<int>("Job 2");
  job.Data = 0;
  job.Run.Every.Seconds(2);

  //submit to scheduler
  scheduler.SubmitJob(job, LogJobExecution);
}


private void LogJobExecution(Job<int> job, int data)
{
  //updates user interface
}

 

image

 

Jobs

 

A job is a simple configuration item for the scheduler. There’s two built-in job types: Job and Job<T>. The only difference between the two is that the latter provides a Data property which allows you to attach state information directly to the job and have it delivered back to you when the job runs.

Read more…

Announcing VFS, the Virtual File System

December 29th, 2009

I’ve been working on a new project of mine for a while now, and opened the project at CodePlex: VFS, the Virtual File System, is basically an abstraction to arbitrary hierarchical resources, which can be handled like a file system.

VFS comes with a set of file system providers and clients (including Silverlight support), and allows you to easily write your own providers (e.g. to expose the contents of a ZIP file on a remote server). Additional offerings are flexible security (e.g. to access your Azure blobs via VFS in order to plug-in a custom authorization scheme), auditing and reliable file transfers.

VFS is currently in early Alpha, but I’m working full steam ahead. Comments and wish lists are appreciated! For a more detailed introduction and a few code snippets, visit the project home:
http://vfs.codeplex.com

 

vfs_provider_model

Author: Categories: Open Source, VFS Tags: