Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
Recently a colleague of mine told me about a suggestion they'd been given about setting up an instance of Sitecore. They were told that you should put your license file into a subfolder of your data directory because the license check enumerates files and folders in the directory containing the file. So if the folder contained other things, this would slow down the check. This sounded odd to me as you have to specify the exact path of the license in your config, so I thought I'd do some investigating, and see if I could prove or disprove the suggestion.
So, putting on my best beret at a jaunty "for science!" angle, here's what I discovered:
Every so often I come across the need for some simple code to schedule a bit of work in the background of an application. Sometimes because a service (for integration tasks, perhaps) needs to kick off processing every so often, or sometimes because some background part of a larger program needs to happen in parallel with the main execution. A common part of these requirements is that the task should run every so often, but two instances of the task should not overlap no matter how long the background processing takes.
A few times I've come across projects with subtly broken implementations of this requirement, so I thought I'd write down a simple approach that has worked for me. That way next time I need it, I won't have to go digging through git repos...
