Getting Started With Quartz.NET – Part 1

This is the first blog post on the series of posts about getting familiar with Quartz.NET. In this blog posts we dig in to the requirements and common things we might want to decide before proceeding.

Evaluating whether Quartz.NET is the thing for you

First of all, it’s always a good thing to evaluate whether the tool is suitable for one’s needs. It goes without saying that like any other tool, Quartz.NET is no silver bullet (but a good golden hammer I hear). The easiest way to nail it is to quote the project’s home page:

Quartz.NET is a full-featured, open source job scheduling system that can be used from smallest apps to large scale enterprise systems

Well big words but I believe that Quartz.NET can live up to it. Quartz.NET was ported from the famous Java Quartz  and so If you’re familiar with the Java one, you should have no trouble grasping the concepts of Quartz.NET. Quartz.NET is distributed with same license as Java version, Apache 2.0, which in short gives plenty of breathing room including hassle-free commercial usage.
Quartz.NET is for you if…

• You need a flexible scheduling framework written in pure .NET
• You need failover or clustering support for job scheduling/execution
• You want the best bang for the buck, it’s free as in beer

Quartz.NET might not be for you if…

• You have a “no open source” policy ;)
• You are trying to handle workflows or batch processing (well you can bend it but it’s just not a natural fit)
• You prefer Visual Studio wizards and shrink-wrapped products – Quartz.NET will have it’s learning curve like any other framework

If you decided yes (a good call) we can proceed!

Quartz.NET requirements

Quartz.NET 1.0 is written in C# and targets framework 1.1 and above (you probably would get it to run with framework 1.0 quite effortlessly). So the requirements in a nutshell:

• .NET Framework 1.1 or above, builds supplied for 1.1, 2.0 and 3.5 separately
• Database if fail-safe persistence required, supported databases include MS SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite and Firebird

As you can see, Quartz.NET is quite self-contained and requires little from you application. If you got interested with the framework then the next post is for you as were going to get started with Quartz.NET!