I’ll be giving my “Digging Into The Developer Toolbox” presentation on the CFMeetup!

Link To Recording

Every developer has their basic toolset – a robust IDE, source control and a good bug tracker. But what else is in your toolbox?

In this presentation I’ll explore some additional tools that can increase your productivity and allow you to concentrate on developing applications.

Some of the tools we will explore include:

• Autohotkey – save time and type less! Autohotkey can do simple text replacements and well as complex GUIs!
• Keyboard Launchers – clean up that messy desktop and stop hunting for icons!
• Virtual desktops – Now that your desktop is clean – organize your applications into task focused areas.
• Cron – replace the unreliable Windows Scheduled task with a simple to use task scheduler.
• Clipboard managers – a clipboard manager can keep a long running history of what you type so you don’t have to. and more…

All of these are free, open-source and for the most part have similar equivalents available on all three platforms – Windows, Mac and Linux.

In this presentation we will focus on Windows.

Windows 98 Scheduled Tasks

On Window XP the ability to reliably schedule anything was severely limited and problematic. Tasks wouldn’t run if you were logged out, and if you changed your password tasks would fail with authentication errors unless you remembered to update each task.

Given these limitations I searched for an alternative and in previous posts I’ve talked about using Cron as a viable replacement for Windows Scheduled tasks.

This has worked great… on Windows XP at work.  Recently while I was preparing for my presentation at CFUnited I discovered that the particular Cron package I was using ( nnCron ) did not work on Windows 7.  I discovered this the night before my presentation!

On a whim I looked to see what the scheduler looked like in Window 7 and was presently surprised in the improvements made by Microsoft!

In Windows 7 you can hit the Windows menu and simply type “Task” and you will see an entry for “Task Scheduler”.

The interface has totally been revamped.  Don’t panic – it is fairly intuitive after clicking around a bit.

Wndows 7 Task Scheduler

The interface is split into 3 panes.  The left most pane is the list of tasks.  The middle pane is where the task details are defined and the right pane is a quick menu to frequent actions.

To get started – hit Create Task in the right pane.

Right Pane - Action Menu

Create Basic Task… will allow you to quickly setup a task with limited options.  Create Task… will give you more control.

New Options

The Create Task pane has several tabs – and clicking through them we can see many new option not available in the old Scheduled Tasks.  You can now run tasks whether you are logged in or not.

New Options

There is too much to cover in one blog post but if you are using Windows 7 take a few minutes to click through and explore all the features.  Between the available triggers (at log on, startup, on event, on lock, etc) and the actions (start program, send mail, display message) and conditions  (on AC power, idle, etc) you should be able to schedule just about anything!

This tuturial will assume you have downloaded nnCron Lite and have it configured according to the online documentation. If you are on Mac or Linux you should already have cron available.  nnCron’s format is the same as Unix so everything here should work anywhere you have cron available.

I installed nnCron to C:\Program Files\cron.  Within that directory you should have a file called cron.tab. This is the main file used for starting and stopping your applications. While it’s not a GUI interface like Scheduled Tasks the configuration file is very easy to understand.  Open cron.tab with Notepad or your favorite text editor.

The syntax is very simple…

# Classic crontab format
# Minutes Hours Days Months WeekDays Command

Some things to note: comments are preceeded by a “#” sign. Empty lines, leading spaces and tabs are ignored.  nnCron also allows you to skip wrapping filenames and paths in quotations, and there is no need to call the command interpreter. Please see the nnCron documentation for more information.

For our first example we will run a batch file every morning to refresh my ColdFusion services to make sure everything is up and running when I get into the office.  So assuming I have a batch file (cf8_restart.cmd) configured to stop and restart my ColdFusion services I can do the following:

# restart web/cf services every morning
0 7 * * 1-5 D:\_documents\scripts\batch\cf8_restart.cmd

The time format breaks down like:

0 = this is minutes – we want to run our script at the top of the hour
7 = equals hours – and we want to kick off our script at 7am (24hr format)
* = no value for days and months
1-5 = weekdays – we want this to only run M-F

For another example I run a backup utility to backup our JIRA instance:

# run JIRA backup procedure every day at 12am and 12pm
0 0,12 * * * C:\Program Files\2BrightSparks\SyncBack\SyncBack.exe -m "JIRA Backup"

0 = this is minutes again – we want to run our script at the top of the hour
0,12 = equals hours – in this case I backup every 12 hours – at midnight and noon
* = no value for days, months and weekdays – this script runs everyday

These examples are very simple but the cron format can do very complicated schedules.

Here are a few examples taken from the nnCron documentation:

• 59 23 31 12 5  -  One minute  before the end of year if the last day of the year is Friday
• 45 17 7 6 *   -  Every  year, on June 7th at 17:45
• 0 9 1-7 * 1   -  First Monday of each month, at 9 a.m.
• 0 0 1 * * – At midnight, on the first day of each month

If you are using Windows Scheduled task and looking for more flexibility and reliability in your scheduled tasks I would encourage you to check out cron.