creating a time based loop

[neilakoga]

Ok, so i'm making a leads distribution system for a sales company, the web app is going to be written in asp.net (vb) and will run on a third party hosting server where i cannot install stuff (com+, etc)

the site is fine and dandy and i will have no problems coding it (Simple data access stuff and emails/sms alerts sent out)

the problem i have is that the system has to be able to check and change the statuses of leads every five minutes, in addition it will have to send emails and sms alerts out. rather than create a web page that does all this and use microsoft scheduler to continuously reload the page every five minutes i thought that i could have a go at writing a vb.net app that does it all and simply run it off the clients machine.

so my question is this, how would i go about creating a time based loop? can anyone point me in the direction of a code example? i figure game's programmers would be able to offer some insight but I'm primarily a web programmer so I'm more used to user interaction to trigger my functions than automated time based loops?

if anyone can help it'd be much appreciated

cheers
Neil

 

[jmcilhinney]

The .NET Framework includes three different Timer classes for different situations. I suggest that you read about all three and see which one suits your situation.

 

[neilakoga]

thanks, i've fixed that bit of the code now, hooray!