Creating a background timer to run asynchronously

I'm really struggling with this. I'm creating a winforms application in visual studio and need a background timer that ticks once every half hour - the purpose of this is to pull down updates from a server.

I have tried a couple of different approaches but they have failed, either due to poor tutorial/examples, or to my own shortcomings in C#. I think it would be a waste of time to show you what I have tried so far as it seems what I tried was pretty far off the mark.

Does anyone know of a clear and simple way of implementing an asynchronous background timer that is easily understandable by a C# newbie?

Solution

// Create a 30 min timer 
timer = new System.Timers.Timer(1800000);

// Hook up the Elapsed event for the timer.
timer.Elapsed += OnTimedEvent;

timer.Enabled = true;
...

private static void OnTimedEvent(object source, ElapsedEventArgs e)
{
    // do stuff
}

with the usual caveats of: timer won't be hugely accurate and might need to GC.KeepAlive(timer)