Scheduling Tasks With Azure Scheduler

By -
In many applications it is necessary to send email notifications on a schedule. There are many ways to achieve this functionality: using a Windows service,  Windows Task Scheduler, or a number of other third party solutions. In our case, we don't have much control over our web server and so we decided against a Windows service. We ended up going with Azure Scheduler which provides a reliable way to hit a network endpoint on a user defined schedule. While not a free solution in most cases, the cost is low for the majority of small applications. Here's how to set up Azure Scheduler:


  1. Open the Azure portal and open the Scheduler Job Collections blade. This can be accessed by searching for scheduler in the top search bar in the Azure portal.


  2. Click Add in the top left corner.


  3. Name the job. The name can only have alphanumeric characters, hyphens, and underscores.
  4. Select or create a new job collection. 
  5. If creating a new job collection, select your pricing tier, resource group, and location. For this example I am using the Free tier but Standard or higher will be required in most applications (auth is not supported in the Free tier). Click OK to create the job collection.
  6. Select the Azure subscription to use.



  7. Configure  the action settings. For this example I am using Http, Get, and the default settings in the optional settings section. The URL is the endpoint the scheduler will access. When you are done click OK.



  8. Configure schedule. I set the schedule to recur once a day at 12:00 AM UTC-4, but Azure supports more advanced schedules. When you are done, click OK.


  9. Click Create. It will take a minute for the job collection to deploy. You may need to refresh to see the new job collection in the list.

That's it! Your job will now run at the frequency you selected. If you want to test the job you can open the job interface and select Run Now. Azure also provides some nice graphics to show the success rate and results of your job actions.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

ASP.NET Identity Remember Me

By -
ASP.NET Identity comes with a built-in Remember Me feature on the Login form, it's supposed to keep a user logged in (via an authentication cookie) for a predetermined period of time set via your code settings. However it sometimes might not work as expected and users will have to frequently log in which will cause quite a bit of frustration. Your first reaction is to modify your code then test / rinse / repeat and possibly still see the same unsuccessful results ... did you also check your website's IIS settings? Code Settings Let's first take a look at the Code configuration settings. If you create a new default MVC 5.x application in Visual Studio (with Authentication set to  Individual User Accounts ) the following code is generated (in  /App_Start/Startup.Auth.cs ): app.UseCookieAuthentication(new CookieAuthenticationOptions { AuthenticationType = DefaultAuthenticationTypes.ApplicationCookie, LoginPath = new PathString("/Account/Login"), Provi
Read more

IIS Express Client Certificates

By -
We recently had to investigate how to  CAC -enable a web application, one of the challenges was setting up a proper development environment to prototype & test code changes before deploying to other environments. STEP 1  - You need to have a client certificate installed on your development machine. Assuming you don't have a readily available CAC or Smart Card, you can either  create a self-signed certificate  OR for this example we just used a  corporate outlook email client certificate (used to sign & encrypt emails).   Note : The certificate should be available in your web browser. For IE go to  Internet Options > Content > Certificates  to view all your certificates. In Chrome, go to  Settings > Show advanced settings > HTTPS/SSL > Manage certificates . STEP 2  - Using Visual Studio, create a default ASP.NET MVC 5 web application. STEP 3  - Enable SSL for your project. In Visual Studio, hit  F4  to open Project Properties and set   SSL Enabled   to   T
Read more

ASP.NET MVC - How to enable/disable CaC/Client Certificate authentication per area or route.

By -
Image
Use Case Typically, when you enable CaC/Client Certificates on a web app you enable it for the entire app. But what if you wanted to disable it for certain sections of the site. For example, an API controller, or a specific Area that hosts pages that can be publicly viewed. Luckily, it's very easy to make this happen. I'll walk through an example that requires CaC authentication for the base app but does not require it to make requests on an API controller, which will use leverage the HTTP Authentication header for auth.  1. Modify the web.config To require client certs for the base app, add this snippet inside the <system.webServer> tag. <!-- Access for the Base App --> <security> <access sslFlags="Ssl, SslNegotiateCert, SslRequireCert" /> </security> Now we can selectively disable client certs for specific sections of the app. In this case, I am disabling it for all routes starting with /api/v1 .
Read more