asked on

implementing a giveaway in .net/c#

Hi everyone,

I'd like to implement a giveaway on mysite, whereby threel times a day a random visitor will receive a message that he won "xyz" (really!).

Is there a way to implement this without a database? I would need to be sure that only three people will get the message and not more!

Thanks in advance

Imran Javed Zia

Hi,
You can do so with following,

Add a counter in Application and just randomly chose one user. // but there is a disadvantage of it, if your application restarts then it will restart the counter. you can avoid then by saving this counter with date in some file on the server.

Thanks

Feivi99

ASKER

Hi IJZ,

I'm not sure what you meant with "add a counter in application".

Alfred A.

Check this out regarding adding a counter in Application_OnStart event of the Global.asax file.

http://forums.asp.net/p/1509963/3594591.aspx

Alfred A.

By the way, the sample in my previous post is for VB.NET. Sorry. The one below is C# inside a Global.asax file:

public class Global : System.Web.HttpApplication
    {
        protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            // Set our user count to 0 when we start the server
            Application["HitCounter"] = 0;
        }

        protected void Session_Start(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            Application.Lock();
            Application["HitCounter"] = (int)(Application["HitCounter"]) + 1;
            Application.UnLock();
        }

        protected void Session_End(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            Application.Lock();
            Application["HitCounter"] = (int)(Application["HitCounter"]) - 1;
            Application.UnLock();
        }

        protected void Application_End(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {

        }
    }

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Feivi99

ASKER

Alfred,

Thanks for this code. There is one problem, however: I'm planning on serving the page from the ASP.NET cache, so I don't think Application_OnStart would work (I may be wrong). Do you know if this or any other event will fire when a page is served from cache?

Thanks

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Alfred A.

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