In the first post of this series I outlined some of VisualCron’s general advantages over the Windows Task Scheduler. When you read today’s post, you will notice that the tool has quite a few additional interesting features.

Before we dive into the details, let us have a look at how VisualCron works. The diagram below shows how a job has to be configured with VisualCron. For most jobs you have to configure one or more tasks (the actions you want to perform), triggers (defined circumstances that will initiate the task), and optional conditions (states that can prevent a task from being launched even if a trigger is present). As you can see in the diagram, VisualCron supports many more task types than the Windows Task Scheduler supports. Once the task has been launched, VisualCron can notify administrators by several means.

Triggers

Triggers can be time-based or event-based. A time-based trigger can be a certain point in time or a time interval such as weekly or daily intervals. VisualCron has more options to offer here than does the Windows Task Scheduler. For example you can tell the tool that the task has to be launched on specific days of the week or hours of the day. VisualCron also supports scheduling based on seconds and years.

VisualCron comes with eight different event-based triggers: VisualCron, File, Mail, Process, Service, Registry, Event log, and Custom (WMI). A VisualCron trigger refers to a state of another VisualCron task. For example, you can launch a new task only if a specific former task has been completed. The names of the other trigger types speak for themselves. For example, the Process trigger can be used to launch a task whenever a certain process starts running. The Custom trigger is certainly the most powerful one because it allows you to use almost any Windows state as a trigger using WMI queries.

The only trigger I miss in VisualCron is the Idle trigger from the Windows Task Scheduler. This trigger probably doesn’t play an important role in server environments because servers are seldom idle; however, on desktops I found this trigger useful.

Conditions

As noted above, conditions are additional states that have to be present for a task to get started. For instance, the Process Condition allows you to specify a certain process that has to be running. If the condition is not met, then the trigger won’t be able to launch the task. A Process Trigger becomes active whenever a process starts running, whereas a Process Condition is met if the process is already running. The other Condition types are VisualCron (check if a VisualCron task is already running), File (check if a certain file is present), and Folder (check if a certain folder is present).

Time Exceptions

Time Exceptions are to time-based triggers as Conditions are to event-based triggers. The options for Time Exceptions offer the same flexibility as time-based triggers. For example, you can configure a VisualCron job that is triggered every 13 seconds, but not on Fridays in the year 2013 (just in case you are a little superstitious ).

Timeouts

Once the task is running, the Timeout specifies how much time the job has to complete. If the Timeout is reached before the task has finished, VisualCron will terminate the job. You can configure Timeouts based on hours, minutes, and seconds. You can also tell VisualCron to consider Timeouts as errors that can trigger notifications or other tasks.

Tasks

As you probably have noticed, the different ways to schedule a task in VisualCron go far beyond the possibilities of the Windows Task Scheduler. This also applies to the supported task types. Whereas the Windows Task Manager supports only three different kinds of actions (start a program, display a message, send an email), VisualCron knows 13 different task categories: Process (execute, kill), File (copy, rename), XML (read / create node), Net (HTTP, SSH), Messaging (email, instant messaging), Database (SQL, Execute DTS package), Encryption (PGP), Service (start, stop), Office (macro), System (Registry, restart, control monitor), Interactivity (desktop macro, send keys), Internal (VisualCron task control, set variables), and Active Directory (create / modify objects). Each of the task categories comes with a couple of different task types. The texts in parentheses are only examples. I can’t discuss all of the different task types, but I think you have an idea now of how mighty VisualCron’s task management is.

Notifications

VisualCron supports seven notification types: Email, File, SQL, Popup, Event log, Sound, and Syslog. Syslog is a standard for forwarding log messages in the UNIX and Linux world, although third-party solutions exist for Windows. You can use this feature to log VisualCron notifications on a remote Syslog server. The most fancy notification form is certainly the SQL notification. It allows you to execute an SQL query or procedure using OLEDB or ODBC. This is especially useful if you work with many different tasks and want to keep track of them in your own application.

However, VisualCron’s user interface will suffice in most cases since it provides a good overview and is highly customizable. This will be the topic of my next post.

If you to have the chance to win VisualCron license, just send an email to:

with the subject line

VisualCron.

Please, add your name and the name of your organization for which you want to use the license. The deadline of this contest is December 4, 2009.