I was reading Scott Hanselman‘s blog about running background tasks in ASP.NET and I was surprise to discover Hangfire! My go-to solution for background tasks in ASP.NET is either console app — straightforward to implement but requires a lot of work — or Windows Scheduler — often kludgy and crash-prone. This is such a relief for me (emphasis mine):

The best feature from Hangfire is its built in /hangfire dashboard that shows you all your scheduled, processing, succeeded and failed jobs. It’s really a nice polished addition.

This drastically reduces, if not eliminates, the need to remote the server just to the check whether a background task has crashed or not; my top pet peeve when implementing background task solution. Had I known Hangfire a few months back, it would’ve saved us a few days of work. Nevertheless, I’m sure it will be a mainstay in my .NET kit.