ASP.net - building online basketball manager how to keep game logic running - c#

my question is this, how can i simulate a text base basketball game in a web application.
The game logic class is ready and in use in my WPF application, however I want to transfer it to a web base application.
But I have no idea how to keep the game thread a live + updating the UI every second.(only text update are required).
Any ideas ?
Thanks.

Maybe you could try to start the main thread in the application_start method of your global.asax file.
But to refresh UI, it's the client browser that will request the data to the server every "x" seconds (with a setTimeout).

Related

How do I recognize someone navigated to my app?

Is there a specific function which is called when someone navigates from the home screen to my app again?
In my application i'm requesting data from a server and i don't want it to be requested everytime someone navigates to my app. The request should come at a maximum of once in an hour. Would a timer keep running when i go from the app to the start screen, or would it stop or keep it's state at maybe 58 minutes?
I'm using c# Windows Phone 8.
If you wish to make a request once an hour maximum, you could simply save the result with a DateTime to evaluate if the request can be made again or not, regardless of the navigation state, but if you really need to know, you can go to the App.xaml code-behind. There, you will find some methods that are useful.
The Application_Launching method is called only when the app starts for the first time. It will not be executed after that. Otherwise, if someone left your application and comes back later, the Application_Activated method will be called.
I also suggest you consult this diagram displaying a Windows Phone app lifetime. The page describes the diagram and gives additional insights.

C# use multithreading or run as separate application?

I have a windows application that reads from a database and populates multiple Listview containers depending on what items the user selects. Some of the data in a particular Listview is right-clickable with a MenuItem option to ‘Write Data to Excel’. This may take around 10 minutes to complete.
I have the Excel Interop portion written in stand-alone code or can I incorporate it into the application project. The Excel Interop app takes only 1 parameter to do its thing.
My question is… should I incorporate it into the Windows App and use multithreading or run it as a standalone app (which seems more efficient), which is called from the Windows App? And what is a good way of doing that where the Windows app starts the process and then can forget about it.
I think that the answer for this one is answered by the question : "What should happen if the user closes the main application during those 10 minutes ?"
If the file should still be wrote, then a standalone application is perfect, cause your threads won't survive.
If the file creation should be interrupted, then I see no reason not to use multithreading, as it seems simpler by default, in particular debugging this part of the code is way easier if it's in the same application.
I would recommend for the below flow:
We can create our own queue which will be either maintained in database or file system.
Then we can write a scheduler which will fetch all the unprocessed request and with the respect to response mark appropriate status of queued item.
Now You application can just call the queuing process and move forward from there.
Use another thread to write it.

Enabling a console application through a Windows Forms application

I'm not going to go into details why am trying to do this, instead of making the main application do the work. I think it's currently easier for me. But I'm not going to use this technique in the future.
In my case, the main form has a button that opens another form. In the second one for you can adjust the amount, pause, resume and stop the work of the console application (sound totally useless (and maybe stupid), but, like I said, I'm not going to go into details why). This means that the application must have access to all the variables and resources of the whole program and vise versa.
I know how to launch a new form trough a main form, but I don't know how to launch a console application.
EDIT:
I forgot to mention, that the console application is a part of the solution.
Your requirement is a bit vague; "the application must have access to all the variables and resources of the whole program and vise versa". 'Variables and resources' cannot be shared across processes, you will instead need interprocess communication of some form.
If your console app merely needs to communicate back to the calling forms app that a RPC has succeeded then use exit codes in the console app, see: How do I return a value from a console application to a service in .NET?
Otherwise this has been answered before: Getting the ouput from Console window into Winform application
You'll need to either create a console emulator (time consuming and difficult to get right), or fire up cmd.exe in another process and use remote procedure calls (or another inter process communication method) to communicate between the two processes
If you want to communicate between the two processes, take a look at this library here:
https://github.com/TheCodeKing/XDMessaging.Net
It allows you to send messages from one app to the other. For example, App1 sends a message "stop" on the channel "randomkey" to ConsoleApp1, ConsoleApp1 can listen on the channel "randomkey" and intercept the "stop" message and stop its current processing.
If you wanted to just open the console window, just use System.Diagnostics.Process.Start();
You can just call Main directly. Beware of doing this on the UI thread directly though!
SomeConsoleApp.Main(new string[]{"-O", "File 1.txt", "-some-parameter"});
Or if you only have an exe, you can do:
System.Diagnostics.Process.Start("someconsoleapp.exe");

C# WinForms: Creating a background notification application

For practical purposes but also as a learning exercise, I am wanting to create notification application to remind me of friend's Birthdays. I would like the application to be running in the background so that it can check the current date against user configured reminders. If a reminder is due then the user is displayed a simple Window that will allow them to snooze or dismiss the notification. I want the application to have user specific notifications (i.e. User A's notifications are not seen when User B is logged in).
Option 1 - Application launched upon Windows startup:
I thought about keeping it simple by checking when to display notifications only when the application starts up. I would then put a shortcut in the Windows Startup folder. However, this probably wouldn't work if the PC is put to sleep and resumed each day.
Option 2 - Application constantly running in background:
I then thought about making the application so it minimises to an icon in the System Tray and thus would constantly be running in the background. It would then periodically check when to display notifications.
Option 3 - Using Windows Service with application:
I then thought about using a Windows Service to do the periodic checks as to when to display notifications. Obviously, a Windows Service cannot display UI notifications so it would need to use some other mechanism for notification (e.g. sending an email). An application could then be used to configure settings that the service uses.
Are there any other options that I have not considered which would work better. I'm currently inclined to go with option 2 for my first implementation but could look to move to a better solution afterwards.
TIA
Your option 2 is the optimal one since you are aimed to distinct users and their reminders - your application runs in the context of a particular user, you already know which remainders need to be shown. Of course, you could go for the third option but this way is really need more time to code and the code itself would be more complex. I would go for the second option. As your applications is WinForms, for the periodical checks I would recommend you to use System.Windows.Forms.Timer class.
By the way, showing an icon in the tray notification area does not make your application "run in the background", it is just a convenient way to show your application is up and running.

How should I run a background service for creating export files for a web site in the Windows world?

I've created a shiny new ASP.Net MVC site and I have offloaded the 'save as' type of functionality to a helper program that can be run in the background on the server so that the website doesn't need to take all that load.
I created it so that it's easy to run from the command line and right now I have it running from a windows scheduler. The problem is that that has a granularity of 1 minute, which means that some unlucky users of the website will click on the link and get a 59s wait + the time to actually process the report.
I'm also slightly worried about the start up cost of my program. I'm assuming that it would be cheaper to keep the program running constantly. I am worried about the program dying and not being respawned though. With the windows scheduler option at least I don't have to worry about my program bailing so much.
How have you dealt with that?
I'd create a Windows Service and have that running instead of an exe via windows scheduler. You can then set it to auto-start. Then you can just have a timer within the service to poll for work every x seconds.
Another alternative is to use something like MSMQ. Your front end would just insert a message into the queue to represent the work to do, then have a .NET service listening to the queue (you can get it to process messages immediately they appear in the queue, or check the queue manually yourself every x seconds).
Either way, I think a Windows Service is the way to go.

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