Visual Studio Console Application Installer - Schedule Windows Task - visual-studio-2010

Question

Does anyone know how to create an installation project using Visual Studio 2010 that creates a Windows Scheduler task? I'm building an installer for a Console Application that needs to run every X minutes, and it would be nice for the customer not to have to schedule it manually.
Thanks!

Answer 1

in Wix (.wixproj) you can do it in a CustomAction, written in Jscript, that invokes Schtasks.exe .
I don't know about VS2010's support of WIX, I think it is built-in.
The custom action module (the .js file) should have a function to run a schtasks command, something like this:
function RunSchtasksCmd(command, deleteOutput) {
deleteOutput = deleteOutput || false;
var shell = new ActiveXObject("WScript.Shell");
var fso = new ActiveXObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject");
var tmpdir = fso.GetSpecialFolder(SpecialFolders.TemporaryFolder);
var tmpFileName = fso.BuildPath(tmpdir, fso.GetTempName());
var windir = fso.GetSpecialFolder(SpecialFolders.WindowsFolder);
var schtasks = fso.BuildPath(windir,"system32\\schtasks.exe") + " " + command;
// use cmd.exe to redirect the output
var rc = shell.Run("%comspec% /c " + schtasks + "> " + tmpFileName, WindowStyle.Hidden, true);
if (deleteOutput) {
fso.DeleteFile(tmpFileName);
}
return {
rc : rc,
outputfile : (deleteOutput) ? null : tmpFileName
};
}
And then, use that from within the custom action function itself, something like this
var r = RunSchtasksCmd("/Create Foo bar baz");
if (r.rc !== 0) {
// 0x80004005 == E_FAIL
throw new Error("exec schtasks.exe returned nonzero rc ("+r.rc+")");
}
var fso = new ActiveXObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject");
var textStream = fso.OpenTextFile(r.outputfile, OpenMode.ForReading);
// Read from the file and parse the results.
while (!textStream.AtEndOfStream) {
var oneLine = textStream.ReadLine();
var line = ParseOneLine(oneLine); // look for errors? success?
}
textStream.Close();
fso.DeleteFile(r.outputfile);
Some people say writing CA's in script is the wrong thing to do, because they are hard to maintain, hard to debug, or it's hard to do them right. I think those are bad reasons. CA's implemented correctly in script, work well.

Answer 2

WIX has its own custom action for creating windows task and scheduling them.
<CustomAction Id="CreateScheduledTask" Return="check" Directory="Application" ExeCommand=""[SystemFolder]SCHTASKS.EXE" /CREATE /SC DAILY /TN "My Task" /ST 12:00:00 /TR "[INSTALLLOCATION]Apps\File.exe" /RU [%USERDOMAIN]\[LogonUser]" />
Above command will create a task with name 'My Task' which will execute everyday at 12 AM.
SCHTASKS command is used to create and schedule a windows task.