Creating and deploying a windows service publishing pages in SDL Tridion - windows-services

Question

Our requirement is to schedule content publishing of a content page to run in recurring intervals in Tridion CMS application. We are currently using Tridion 2009 SP1 version.
As per the suggestion from the experts as in: Tridion 2009 SP1: How to schedule a content page for a recurring publishing? we have created a simple C# console application that has referenced Triond Interop .dll's as below:
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using Tridion.ContentManager.Interop.TDS;
using Tridion.ContentManager.Interop.TDSDefines;
using Tridion.ContentManager.Interop.msxml4;
using System.Configuration;
namespace SchedulePublish
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
//Please use your system related corresponding webdav url's and tcm id's where ever required. Below are just sample :)
TDSE tdse = new TDSE();
//Give some identity that has access rights on tridion UI
string Identity = #"Domain Name\Username";
tdse.Impersonate(Identity);
tdse.Initialize();
string targetTypeId = "tcm:0-1-65537";
Publication Pub_Obj = (Publication)tdse.GetPublication("/webdav/30%20DIRECTV%20sites");
XMLReadFilter Filter = new XMLReadFilter();
Component CompObj = (Component)tdse.GetObject("/webdav/30%20DIRECTV%20sites/Home/System/xml/Knavigation.xml",
EnumOpenMode.OpenModeView, Pub_Obj.ID, Filter);
DateTime schedulePublishDate = Convert.ToDateTime(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["SharedPath"].ToString());
CompObj.Publish(targetTypeId, false, false, false, schedulePublishDate, DateTime.MinValue, DateTime.Now, true, EnumPublishPriority.High, false, 3);
}
}
}
As we are new, please provide pointers to implement the below steps:
1.Tridion CMS servers do not have Visual studio installed so please suggest a way to run this application and verify if we are able to publish the content as required.
2.Host this application in the Tridion CMS Server and schedule it to run at the desired intervals every week.

Answer 1

You don't need Visual Studio to run your new console app, simply compile it and copy the files to the CMS server.
If you run the application, you should see items appearing in your Publication Queue, if you don't see your items added to the Publish Queue, I would recommend adding some logging calls to your application so you can see where the code is failing (consider using Log4J.NET if you have not done logging before).
Once you have validated that it works as desired, the easiest way to schedule it is to create a task using the Windows Task Scheduler. There is no way to run such a task from within the CMS. Alternatively you could convert your console app to a windows service, but I think this would be overkill in this case.