title: Regularly invoking an interactive process (WatiN tests) via Task Scheduler
body: <p>I'm using a suite of WatiN tests driving IE to do some periodic sanity checking for the purposes of monitoring a site.</p>
  
  <p>The suite works fine when I invoke it interactively and/or when I configure the task in Task Scheduler to "Run only when the user is logged on".</p>
  
  <p>However, when I set it to "Run whether the user is logged on or not", and check the "Run with highest privileges" option (WatiN can't talk to the browser satisfactorily under Windows Server 2008 and many other OSes without having admin privileges), WatiN can't communicate with it's iexplore.exe instances satisfactorily (they start, but I get a <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/750600/watin-compatibility-with-windows/1496925#1496925">timeout exception as detailed in this post</a>). I have added the site I'm hitting to the Trusted sites for both admin and non-admin contexts of IE. I've tried with and without elevation, with and without disabling ESC and with and with and without turning off Protected Mode for the internet zone. As my non-GUI tests are happy, I assume it's a limitation of the type of interactivity that's possible in the context of a non-interactive Scheduled Task, even when "Run with highest privileges".</p>
  
  <p>Right now, my temporary workaround is to require a [TS] session to remain open at all times, ready to run the scheduled task.</p>
  
  <p>If I was to persist with this, I'd at a minimum add a heartbeat notification to allow something to monitor that the task is actually getting to run [e.g., if someone logs the session off or reboots the box].</p>
  
  <p>However, I'm looking for something more permanent -- something that is capable of regularly invoking my WatiN tests [run using xunit-console.x86.exe v 1.5] on my Windows Server 2008 [x64] box, just like Task Scheduler but with a proper Interactive session.</p>
  
  <p>I'd prefer not to use psexec or remcom if possible, and can't see how creating a Windows Service would do anything other than add another point of failure but I'd be interested to hear of all proven solutions out there.</p>