Comments on: Scheduled Task Slippage and Breakage

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 21:37:21 +0000

This is also one of my favourite moments in Windows user interface design. It's the ultimate counter-example to disrupt user interface design discussions based on "Well Windows behaves like this, so we should" discussions.

When you launch the "Add Scheduled Tasks" notepaddy thing, you find yourself in ye olde wizard interface.

The niggle I have is that this wizard starts you at a page that's completely useless to ... everyone... and forces you to click "Next" to do anything. Clicking "next" is surprising, because the anything you want to do is still an eternity away. Clicking next makes your cursor goes busy and the wizard looks like it's hanging, (often) for minutes, while Windows dredges up all of the registered executables on your machine and presents them in a tiny window with a very long scrollbar. It is only now that you have access to the "Browse..." button, which for me is almost what I want on page 1... along with command line parameters... am I so different from regular people?

Note also the icon used for the Scheduled Task Wizard in the taskbar.

Half-assed doesn't begin to describe this dusty corner of Windows.

By: Peter

Peter — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 21:37:21 +0000

Of course having a “desktop cleanup wizard” has to be one of the most stupid user interface concepts. Surely this is a one step operation that is only made more complex by presenting it in a wizard.

By: mrd

mrd — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 21:37:21 +0000

A better alternative to scheduled tasks is VisualCron -> http://www.visualcron.com

By: Kevin G.

Kevin G. — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 21:37:21 +0000

Excellent (and very entertaining) article.

To be clear, the actual behavior of "Notify Me of Missed Tasks" appears to be "Put up an annoying and misleading message in a pop-up." The pop-up reads ""Some tasks did not execute at their scheduled times because the Task Scheduler service was not running." What it really means is that it is hypothetically possible that some tasks might not have executed, because the Task Scheduler service was, however briefly, not running. Note that Windows does not actual compare the scheduled task times against the service outage. The pop-up is especially annoying and misleading during a restart of the workstation.

The workaround to disable these annoying messages is to disable (uncheck) "Notify Me of Missed Tasks." As documented above, this option doesn't do what it says, anyway!

By: William Stacey

William Stacey — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 21:37:21 +0000

Actually, it does what it says. When scheduler starts, it enums the tasks and checks their NextRunTime to see if task is ready to run, if so, it runs it. However, if the NextRunTime is too far in the past, it knows the task did not run so it throws the Missed message. The logic is something like: if ( task.nextRunTime + TimeSpan.FromSeconds(MaxLagSeconds)

By: alastair

alastair — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 21:37:21 +0000

William, I’m not sure if you were just replying to Kevin G’s point, but my main problem with it is that there are many reasons why a scheduled task can fail to run, but only one of these reasons will cause the error notification. Either the wording needs to be fixed to more accurately represent the behaviour, or the task scheduler needs to be fixed to notify of all possible errors when scheduling tasks.

By: William Stacey

William Stacey — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 21:37:21 +0000

"Either the wording needs to be fixed to more accurately represent the behaviour, or the task scheduler needs to be fixed to notify of all possible errors when scheduling tasks."

I totally agree. IMO, you should get error notifications for everything. But then should they be logged in Event log of with popup. I don't like popups because they are to easy to click away and forget. As for naming. Not sure. An error task is not a missed task, it actually started from the schedulers point of view, but had some kind of error along the way. A missed task is one that the scheduler never even tried to kick off because it was too far in the past. So I think the name is ok for that. They need to add another check box called "Notify on Error" as well.

By: Oliver Reid

Oliver Reid — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 21:37:21 +0000

While we are all here can someone tell me how to set the TS so that tasks are visible if the user they are running under is logged in. I have 2 w2003 Server machines: on one the DOS window opens and I can watch the task run. On the other it is all invisible. AFAIK the settings are identical on both machines.

Many, Many thanks

By: Confused

Confused — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 21:37:21 +0000

Um… nice rant but no solution…

By: Jestin Lightner

Jestin Lightner — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 21:37:21 +0000

im looking for a 3rd party solution right now. ive notified microsoft that the steps they offer as a solution are nothing but verification of the default settings and that if compatibility problems exist (yeah right, IF) we should be informed. In my opinion i consider it to be lazy/sloppy programming which is why we have such security problems today; they dont give a damn.