Have I mentioned how much I don't like Timer Jobs? Let me rephrase that, timer jobs that other people write that aren't designed correctly? Yeah, irks me. So we can't say that all the Timer Jobs in the Beta are perfect, some have some issues, but its beta and we should come to expect not everything is going to work right now.
For those that really cause us trouble though, how do we debug them? We can attach to the owstimer.exe service I suppose, but then you are causing more problems with the other jobs waiting to get some of the precious CPU cycles while your debugging.
So how about we try a different approach? I like using SQL Profiler, it is one of my favorite tools. It comes in really handy to figure out what really is going on on a SharePoint page (the Developer Dashboard is nice, but don't let it fool you, there is more going on than what it tells you) and…Timer Jobs. problem is, sql profiler requires you to get really specific about what you want to see. Not much you can do when everything coming in is tagged as a ".NET Application"…except for…turn everything OFF!
Turn off all the services, turn off all the timer jobs you don't want to look at or care about. Turning off services is easy enough to do…timer jobs…ugg…little more difficult. What about searching for a timer job? Yeah, good luck with that one with just Out of the Box.
So I built a neat little tool and posted it to codeplex. It lets you turn all the timer jobs off, now two of them cannot be turned off, but they don't end up causing much traffic, so no worries there. With this tool you can search for timer jobs by Name, Title, ID, Schedule and Lock Type. You can update, updateable properties and click "Update". You can disable, enable and "Run Now" with just a click of a button!
Sweet! Download the source code here: http://bit.ly/4ydtNr
I plan on doing some heavy reverse engineering on some of these bad boys…I encourage you to do the same!
Chris