Comments by Jacob Himes (Top 20 by date)

Very true, its annoying the nomenclature of the dev world.

The management of the console application is not taken care of by user implementation. The console application is started by a scheduled task, as In this time of day, not by a http request or a request running on a schedule. It is nearly the same as scheduling a program to run on your local machine with Windows at a certain time of day. It is executed by the fabric of the cloud environment PaaS. Windows service is not an option unless you have a virtual machine, which costs a few more dollars, OP has a shared web instance, they do not run windows services.

Of course I may be misunderstanding OP's question in the sense he wants this task to run every time a record is created, but he said "schedule" then "task", then mentioned how he cannot do it in a shared hosting instance via a windows service, so I'm at the mercy of context clues here.

FYI I totatly agree with you that invoking a new console process should never be at the end of a stateless http call.

Yes you are very right the misconception needs to be addressed. I'm actually still unsure if the client met a web form or a windows form since later in the question he mentions he tried writing a windows service. It is a common misconception by beginners to create a blank windows form to perform a task that requires no user interaction.

Console applications are great for web jobs, and recommended along bat files and other script file types. The web job controls the lifetime of the application. It fires up the console application...waits for it to complete, and then will not fire it up again until the next scheduled time. Console applications when written correctly close themselves when they are done executing. If a continuous job is needed, the console app is written as an endless loop. Also, all output of the app is stored in the cloud log. This is standard in cloud solutions like Azure, BlueMix, and Amazon.

Here's a link to how a web job works in Azure.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/web-sites-create-web-jobs/

Amen, never use concatenation for queries. And data model your database layer if you can.