Date Time Programming Question

You have:

    if Monday then
        do mondayProtocol

and your app is "running tasks continously"...so does that mean your app is also running continously?

It is technically Monday at midnight...so you want "mondayProtocol" to run when?

(a) At midnight on Monday
(b) Only once each Monday when the app is started
(c) Every time the app is started on Mondays
(d) Something else

What should happen if the app is not run on Monday at all?

Typically you have three choices for these types of apps:

(1) Use a Polling Timer and compare the current time against a list of events.
(2) Create a seperate thread for each event and put it to sleep until it should wake up.
(3) Use an external scheduling mechanism (such as windows scheduler) and pass an event "ID" into the app via command line arguments.

My app is running continously and the Monday protocol would run all day Monday from 0000 until approximately 2300 when a subroutine would begin preperation for the Tuesday protocol. Also while running, the changing of the hour would change Monday subroutines.

a generic hierarchy would be

General Week Protocol (Normal Operations)
           Crossover         Crossover          Crossover    Crossover     Crossover       Crossover
Monday            Tuesday          Wednesday     Thursday         Friday             Saturday          Sunday
0000 Routine    0000 Routine   0000 Routine   0000 Routine   0000 Routine  0000 Routine    0000 Routine
0100 Routine    0100 Routine   0100 Routine   0100 Routine   0100 Routine  0100 Routine    0100 Routine
etc

with all the hourly routine (sorry I'm an mixing the terms routine and process/procedure) incrementing hourly so that theoretically each hour of each day has a seperate routine triggered - even if the routine calls for the app to do nothing.

I like the seperate thread idea, that seems to be the most logical for my situation as it would allow my crossover routine to work in the background while the other routines are running and would allow my program to continue it's foreground work. Could you elaborate with a specific code example on constructing the thread and setting it to initiate at a specific day time?

Is this going to be a console app or a windows form?  If you are using a form, drop a timer control on the form.  Set its interval to 1000 milliseconds (i.e. 1 second).  Make sure that it is enabled (I say that becuase I forget that step from time to time :>).

Do some additional research on threading.  It is a very complicated issue (concurrency issues and the like)
The code I have provided I think will work, but I haven't done much threading.  

In the Timer tick event, you can use the following code

Private Sub Timer1_Tick(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Timer1.Tick
dim myDate as date = now
 Select Case mydate.DayOfWeek
            Case DayOfWeek.Sunday

            Case DayOfWeek.Monday
                'monday is the subroutine to which the thread will execute
                Dim myThred As New Threading.Thread(AddressOf monday)
                myThred.Start()
            Case DayOfWeek.Tuesday
            Case DayOfWeek.Wednesday
            Case DayOfWeek.Thursday
            Case DayOfWeek.Friday
            Case DayOfWeek.Saturday
        End Select
end sub
private sub monday()
 Select Case myTime
            Case Is = CDate("00:00:00")
               MidnightMonday
  end select
end sub

The 'at' command in a command window (DOS Box) can do all the scheduling you need. Simply make a separate prog for each job and and let Windows do the scheduling.

Type

    at /?

or

    help at

at the command prompt if you want to learn more.

Regards, Alex

Forced accept.

Computer101
EE Admin