34 Building background tasks and ser vices

We’ve covered a lot of ground in the book so far. You’ve learned how to create page-based applications using Razor Pages and how to create APIs for mobile clients and services. You’ve seen how to add authentication and authorization to your application, use Entity Framework Core (EF Core) for storing state in the database, and create custom components to meet your requirements.

As well as using these UI-focused apps, you may find you need to build background or batch-task services. These services aren’t meant to interact with users directly. Rather, they stay running in the background, processing items from a queue or periodically executing a long-running process.

For example, you might want to have a background service that sends email confirmations for e-commerce orders or a batch job that calculates sales and losses for retail stores after the shops close. ASP.NET Core includes support for these background tasks by providing abstractions for running a task in the background when your application starts.

34.1 Running background tasks with IHostedService

34.1.1 Running background tasks on a timer

34.1.2 Using scoped services in background tasks

34.2 Creating headless worker services using IHost

34.2.1 Creating a worker service from a template

34.2.2 Running worker services in production

34.3 Coordinating background tasks using Quartz.NET

34.3.1 Installing Quartz.NET in an ASP.NET Core application

34.3.2 Configuring a job to run on a schedule with Quartz.NET

34.3.3 Using clustering to add redundancy to your background tasks

Summary