.net
.net
A couple of weeks ago I was having issues tracking down a particularly confusing performance issue with Velowear.com. Since Velowear.com utilizes asp.net and webcom to work with the Ecometry order management system I could not use the built in Cassini web server to run and debug the web site. For the last two years I'd do all my coding on my own computer and upload the changes to a test server to see if everything would compile and run as expected. This worked ok, but it did not allow me to easily debug things, plus it was a pain if...
Background I use ArrayList heavily to load datasets into memory to minimize database queries. This creates huge performance increases, especially for retail oriented sites with lots of product browsing. I had implemented sorting and searching prior to LINQ but doing this involved somewhat archaic means (IComparer, and foreach loops) I knew there had to a better way to filter an ArrayList than using a foreach loop so I looked into the LINQ functionality. I found this MSDN article that explained most of what I wanted. I also wanted to put the data back into an ArrayList so I had to...
Warning this post is very techy and boring. Do not read unless your a programmer.
Purpose
I wanted to create a scheduled task (in a separate thread) to run every couple of hours on an ecommerce site, and could not find a good solution. After much googleing and piecing some things together I figured it out and it is really easy to do this (See code at bottom of post). There are great articles on creating/using threads in asp.net, so I don't feel a need to cover it here (just make sure to handle all of your errors in a thread or it will fail w/o...