Azure worker roles and recurring tasks
In our application we have multiple web front ends communicating with one or more worker roles. This allows our worker roles to take the brunt of expensive operations. For example, some (very infrequent) actions require up to about 500 emails being sent (via Amazon SES). Before Azure (BA), we did everything on the web server - it wasn't common but sometimes users reported over a minute from clicking the button to the result being displayed. Our move to using workers responding to queue messages has massively sped this sort of thing up. Most actions on the worker are triggered by queue messages but we do have several things that just need to happen at set intervals (we use blob leases to prevent multiple workers doing the same thing). While implementing the "ExclusiveJobHost" and "BlobLease" classes, I noticed a common pattern that I ended up pulling out: public class RecurringAction { private ManualResetEvent exitSignal = new ManualResetEvent( false ...