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Good morning. I have an application that queries a REST source. It needs to run continuously, capturing data which is refreshed every five minutes, without fail. My solution is Task Scheduler, where the app is set to launch on server boot. Once launched, it uses a timer to re-query periodically. The TS task is set to repeat every five minutes, with the check box "if app is already running, do not start another instance," so if the app crashes it should restart automatically within five minutes.

This works fine, but TS launches the app invisibly. I'd feel warmer and fuzzier inside if I could see the app, just as if I'd launched it myself. Also, if I need to close it (e.g., to post a new exe), I have to kill it via Task Manager; ouch. I've gone over the TS options a dozen times for some kind of "launch in foreground" option, but none exists. Can anyone tell me what I'm missing?

Notes:

  • From my web searches, it's clear that an app is only allowed to interact with the desktop if it's running under the same user account... but it is, I'm using my AD account, not SYSTEM or another local account.
  • It's acceptable for the app to only be visible to me, though even better would be if other users could also see and interact with it. I suppose the only way that would work would be if each user had their own monitor app which just reflected results exposed from a single invisible app which actually did the work.
  • I get the same behavior if I start the TS task manually or if it launches on boot automatically.
  • "Run only when the user is logged on" won't do, as I need it to resume even if the server restarts in the middle of the night.
  • I had been launching the app with a little PS script, so I could send a notification if the app failed to launch at all, but there's no change if I have TS launch it directly.

I suppose the proper solution would be to write this as a service. I put some time into that, but I haven't done that before and couldn't get it running. If the consensus is that that would be a better approach, I'll give it another try.

Any ideas? Thanks!

  • did you ever find a solution for this? If so, could you share it? – mservidio Jul 11 '12 at 19:37
  • No, I'm afraid not. I've lived with it running invisibly; where I need more control, I've tended toward apps which run and then close, so I can pause the TS job and run the app manually if necessary. But that's just a workaround. –  Jul 11 '12 at 20:32

1 Answers1

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If you set the task to "run only when user is logged in" then it will be visible for you if you uncheck the "hidden" box.

If you have the "Run whetever user is logged on or not" choice checked, then it will be hidden even if you uncheck the "hidden" box. The implementation of Task Scheduler doesn't allow you to run programs in the foreground if you aren't logged in.

To solve this you can create a user that does AutoAdminLogon and start the application with the Startup script. By doing it this way, you will make the server log in with this user on boot and start the program you want.

If you then want to check how it's going or so, you can login as that user or switch to that session.

Zhakal
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