Member-only story
Handling Background Tasks with Hosted Services in ASP.NET Core
Effortlessly Manage Background Tasks with Hosted Services in ASP.NET Core
Hi Devs, In most applications, you may need to perform tasks that don’t directly involve user interaction. Examples include sending notifications, processing files, cleaning up resources, or monitoring system health. ASP.NET Core provides a clean way to handle such tasks using Hosted Services. This article explains hosted services with detailed examples to help you use them effectively.
What Are Hosted Services?
A Hosted Service is a class that runs background tasks within the lifetime of an ASP.NET Core application. It is designed to perform work independently of incoming HTTP requests. Hosted services are implemented using the IHostedService interface.
Key Features of Hosted Services:
- They start running when the application starts.
- They stop gracefully when the application shuts down.
- They integrate seamlessly with ASP.NET Core’s dependency injection (DI) system.
Why Use Hosted Services?
Hosted services are useful for:
- Running recurring tasks (e.g., sending periodic emails).
- Monitoring resources (e.g., checking server health).
- Processing queued work (e.g., handling tasks from a message queue like RabbitMQ or Kafka).
- Performing scheduled tasks (e.g., cleaning up old database records).
By using hosted services, you can offload long-running or recurring tasks from the main application thread.
Types of Hosted Services
1. BackgroundService
This is an abstract base class provided by ASP.NET Core. It simplifies the implementation of IHostedService for tasks. It runs continuously in the background. You only need to override the ExecuteAsync method to define your task.
