c# alarm class implementation?

[AndrewCherry]

I'm writing a simple little c# class to simply function as an alarm - you pass it a System.DateTime with the constructor, and when that time is reached, it fires an "Alarm" event. Simple enough. However, what's the most efficient way of doing this? Currently, I have thought of two ways. The first has a timer within the class that raises it's event every second or so, and each time it checks to see whether the time now is the same as the target time (accurate to the minute essentially, which is all that's neccesary). The second is to work out how many milliseconds is between the time the control is enabled, and the target time, and set the interval to that. With repeat turned off, this means that in theory the timer will fire when the alarm is due, which is maybe more efficient than regular comparison checking? Are these both crazy? Which is more sensible? Is the System.Timers.Timer accurate enough to do the second option anyway? Am i missing a very easy way of doing this that is nothing like the above? Thank you very much in advance for any comments.

[Matt Philmon]

There doesn't appear to be any clear "best" way of dealing with this kind of thing. I have a couple of Windows Services that have to do various things at "scheduled" times. At the time I needed to write them, I chose the services route. Who knows now whether another method would have worked better... but from my experience it doesn't matter much. I run a timer as you suggested. Since my timing is accurate to the minute (not second) then I fire the timer every 60 seconds. Start the timer when the application starts and let it go with that. Don't use the Forms Timer. Use one of others. They're much better (like the System.Timers or the System.Threading.Timers). Another option (which I could have taken) is to use the .NET framework wrappers for the Windows Scheduler service. There's an article on here all about that. Then you can write an application that runs when it's scheduled to and that's it. Simple as you please as long as the user is letting this service run.

[Not Active]

This isn't really a framework related question and besides you have already posted the same question to the C# forum.:mad:

[AndrewCherry]

Many apologies for any annoyance caused by a double post - I couldn't decide whether this was more of a general framework question or not. I happen to implement in c#, so posted there first, but thought that then it might be more appropriate as a general question of technique. Again, apologies for offence caused!