Hi there! I’m writing just to inform you that Hangfire Blog moved to the official site (long time ago, sorry for the late notification):
I’m not’ ready to blog about anything else yet, and it would be very strange to write only about Hangfire in a personal blog. New product blog contains all the required links, has the same header as other parts of official site and thus is more useful.
Logging was a very difficult thing to set-up in previous versions of Hangfire. Even if we omit tricky versioning issues, you had to install a separate logging adapter for your current logging library, with guessing the right one first (i.e. Common.Logging.NLog or Common.Logging.NLog20).
Now, the logging just works. If your project already uses Elmah, NLog, Log4Net, EntLib Logging, Serilog or Loupe you are not required to do anything. Thanks to awesome LibLog library by Damian Hickey (@randompunter on Twitter), installed logging library will be used automatically through the reflection.
If your application uses other logging library or a custom one, just implement two simple interfaces:
public interface ILog
{
bool Log(LogLevel logLevel, Func<string> messageFunc,
Exception exception);
}
public interface ILogProvider
{
ILog GetLogger(string name);
}And yes, Hangfire is no more have Common.Logging or Common.Logging.Core dependencies.
SymbolSource is a service which exposes PDB symbols so you can step through Hangfire code while debugging your application. There are a few things to configure before we can begin, see symbolsource.org for more information.
Within Visual Studio:
To speed up startup of the debug session, you can specify only the Hangfire dlls to be loaded. Go to Tools → Options → Debugger → Symbols, select “Only specified modules” and enter Hangfire.*.dll
Now you can step into Hangfire code while debugging.
*.pdb and source files.ServerTimeout option.LibLog package instead of Common.Logging for logging.Hangfire.SqlServer is now merged with Dapper package.Dapper package updated to 1.38.Microsoft.Owin.Host.SystemWeb to the latest version.As an ASP.NET developer, I always wanted to have something simple to handle scenarios where you need to build a long-running async task and show a loader to a user:
Loading…
Nothing is being loaded here, don't let hypnotize yourself!
But every time I faced Windows Services, message queues and other difficult-to-understand problems and hard-to-maintain solutions, my head exploded into a billion pieces. At the same time I looked at Rails’ Sidekiq and wished to have a simple .NET alternative for background job processing. That is why I began to develop Hangfire (yep, just for the loader).
Slightly more than a year passed from the first commit and first version of Hangfire. This was my first open-source project that is being used more than in one organization, and it was an amazing experience for me to grow a project from scratch. I’m glad to see more and more people coming to the project and giving positive ratings and unvaluable feedback.
I want to keep Hangfire project as free as possible, but eliminate the most dangerous risk – the absence of time. There are many things to be done, including problems, new features, documentation, and I want to do them in a reasonable time.
Today, I’m introducing a new stage of Hangfire development – Hangfire Pro. It is a set of paid libraries that extend Hangfire functionality by providing features to improve performance and simplifying maintenance of background job processing in larger applications.
First, I’ll start with bad news – Hangfire.Redis package is moved to Hangfire Pro. This means that it became available only for Pro users and will be removed from public NuGet Gallery soon.
I understand that this step breaks your expectations, and I’m sorry for this. The source code will be available at Hangfire.Redis repository, but there will be no updates and official support.
Other existing parts of Hangfire will not be moved to the Pro version ever. Moreover, I’ll try to do the vice versa, by open-sourcing paid extensions in the future, when the project will be more stable.
Most wanted features were implemented in the next version of Hangfire.Redis package. It now includes:
ILMerge /internalize utility is being used to merge them into Hangfire.Redis assembly. So, you can use either Service v3 or v4 in your projects.RedisStorageOptions.Prefix property.Hangfire Pro already includes previously mentioned new version of Hangfire Redis package and a completely new Hangfire.PerformanceCounters package. The latter pushes internal metrics to Windows Performance Counters to proactively monitor issues with background job processing:
Hangfire Pro is available through the subscriptions you can buy at the official site. After purchasing a subscription, you will be able to do the following things:
As I already said, Hangfire Pro will solve performance/usability/monitoring issues for larger web applications. Further work will be made in the following directions.
Batch jobs will help to build more complex workflows with Hangfire. They will give you the power of parallel processing and continuations, you can look at this code snippet:
BatchJob
.Create(x =>
{
x.Enqueue(() => Console.Write("Messy"));
x.Enqueue(() => Console.Write("Output"));
x.Enqueue(() => Console.Write("With"));
})
.ContinueWith(() => Console.WriteLine("Predictable continuation"));
Three first tasks will be executed in parallel, end the continuation will be invoked only after successful run of the first tasks.
As with async controllers in ASP.NET MVC, this feature enables you to improve overall throughput keeping the lowest number of workers in the pool. Instead of waiting for an outstanding I/O operation, they will be able to process other background jobs as well.
public static async Task HighlightAsync(int snippetId)
{
var snippet = await Context.Snippets.SingleOrDefaultAsync(snippetId);
snippet.Code = await RemoteService.HighlightAsync(snippet.Code);
await Context.SaveChangesAsync();
}
Smart people say that content like this should contain a call to action. I have no enough experience to break the rules, so here it is:
Hangfire has finally reached the 1.0 milestone! This means that public API is frozen and considered to be stable. Starting from now, the SemVer 2.0 specification will be used for versioning every package (but there may be exceptions, follow the README for each package).
I want to thank everyone who helped me to reach this milestone, without your participation I would not be able to finish the work. Special thanks:
Hangfire (not HangFire).Hangfire.Core now contains the dashboard. There is no more Hangfire.Web./hangfire (without .axd suffix).Enqueue method overloads with queue parameter.AspNetBackgroundJobServer class.If you have only Hangfire package installed, package update is very simple. Just type in your Package Manager Console window:
PM> Update-Package Hangfire
For custom installations, first update each package, and then remove the Hangfire.Web:
PM> Update-Package Hangfire.Core
PM> Uninstall-Package Hangfire.Web
HangFire (case-sensitive) to Hangfire (lowercased f letter) in your projects.UseHangfire extension method for OWIN app builder instead of AspNetBackgroundJobServer./hangfire.axd to /hangfire.This version brings incredibly easy method of scheduling and running recurring jobs inside ASP.NET applications. You need to call only a single line of code to perform this task:
RecurringJob.AddOrUpdate(() => Console.Write("Easy!"), Cron.Daily);
The Cron class provides different easy to use methods and overloads to set up recurring jobs on a minutely, hourly, weekly, monthly and yearly basis. It is also possible to use more complex CRON expressions, since the NCrontab library is being used to perform scheduling logic.
RecurringJob.AddOrUpdate(
() => Console.Write("Powerful!"),
"0 12 * */2");
HangFire will check the schedule each minute and enqueue recurring jobs as regular background jobs, so you receive all power of HangFire, including the full transparency, free of charge.
HangFire Monitor was also updated and allows you to see and manage your recurring jobs:
So, HangFire now supports all kinds of background jobs: fire-and-forget, delayed and recurring, and let you process them with ease!
SqlServerStorage now also accepts connection string names.IBackgroundJobClient does not implement the IDisposable interface anymore.IMonitoringApi does not implement the IDisposable interface anymore.DateTime resolution for job arguments by including milliseconds.RetryAttribute class. Please, use AutomaticRetryAttribute.KeyNotFoundException when accessing job cancellation token with Redis.Version 0.9 brings some breaking changes. Please, do the following steps to perform the upgrade.
RetryAttribute with AutomaticRetryAttribute.Dispose method of IBackgroundJobClient interface (or BackgroundJobClient class).IMonitoringApi.Dispose method.