Way for user to see progress on long running asp.net process

[Ralph]

Okay I have a website where the user is going to hit a button to kick
off a process that is going to take a long amount of time.
Is there anyway without using AJAX, or possibly a windows control on a
page that connects to a webservice to show the user the progress of
this operation.
It seems almost a given that I must use either ajax or some kind of
control to do this.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance

Ralph

 

[Ralph]

So far I have come up with two non Ajax/winforms controls solutions.
1) when user clicks button call both the server and the client events.
in the client event call another aspx that actually runs the page via
a popup.
Can tell user they must have popups enabled. Not writing this app for
the world.
In my server code simply call another page that uses javascript
timeout, to call its self every 10 to 30 seconds to read values put in
the session by the process and display status to user.

2) would be launching the process in a thread.
I have always shied away from threads in a web app.
Use them in winforms, windows services, just was never shure what the
behaviour of a thread would be in a web app. Does anyone have any
experience using threads in a web app.

 

[Guest]

Ralph,
First off, this isn't a C# Language newsgroup question, its an ASP.NET
newsgroup question, and really belongs in that group.

There are literally dozens of approaches to this from using an intermediate
"progress page" (here is one :
http://www.eggheadcafe.com/articles/20050108.asp ) to using background
polling on a secondary thread in Global.asax. Search around on "ASP.NET
progress" and you'l find plenty more ideas.
Peter