MSMQ from the plumber's mate

Quick clarification point to prevent confusion: MSMQ 5.0 means Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 MSMQ 4.0 means Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 'R1' Currently there doesn't seem to be much to worry about - business as usual for most...

[[Edited 11th, 13th, 15th January, 2010]] To specify an IP address in a registry value, there are usually two ways: Type the dotted notation IP address directly (STRING values) Convert the IP address to hex (DWORD values) The dotted notation...

I received an emailed question about this combination and thought I would do some research to see if there was anything of interest to share. First thing to cover is that each Terminal Server client does NOT get their own instance of MSMQ. The server...

Sometimes you can have a problem where you can't remotely receive messages from another machine but don't know where to start troubleshooting. Normally you will get something informative back as an exception, such as: 0xC00E0025 (MQ_ERROR_ACCESS_DENIED...

Next week I'm planning to " Ramp Up " my developer skills using a free, online, community-based learning program hosted on MSDN . There are a number of tracks to follow - not surprisingly I'm going to try out the Developer Basics. As the site says, you...

I've just responded to a newsgroup poster asking how to avoid using MSDTC on a cluster. Their applications weren't using distributed transactions and they didn't want to have to provide another shared disk just for MSDTC. On a cluster, there is only...

My colleague over in Paris, Jean-Pierre Auconie, has lovingly crafted a BizTalk support tool that you may find useful. From the FAQ: Q: What is the purpose of MBV ? A: The goal of MBV is to retrieve the maximum amount of information from a BizTalk...

There's a new KnowledgeBase article just out (last week in fact) that contains some TCP settings you may want to check to see if they are causing you problems. TCP settings that can impact BizTalk Server It includes: Disabling SynAttackProtect...

Regularly backing up the BizTalk databases is an essential task, as documented here: Backing Up and Restoring BizTalk Server Databases “A common way to back up databases is to create a complete backup of the database once per day (if the database...

[[Edited November 6th, 2009]] I think it is always a good idea to keep on top of any changes to the products you are using and this includes knowing what hotfixes have been released since the latest service pack. To this end I've produced a table...

With 64-bit operating systems, it is possible for MSMQ to hold a vast number of messages. Some people think this is a good thing as it means MSMQ can wait out any network outages without running out of space. In the past with 32-bit systems, only a...

It's official - this blog is where Microsoft now goes for publishing bug reports. This bug is one you are very unlikely to encounter - you have to be using Distribution Lists in PROPID_M_RESP_FORMAT_NAME which is quite a rare design choice. The...

If you are using File receive locations and BizTalk starts generating events like: Event Type: Error Event Source: BizTalk Server 2006 Event Category: (1) Event ID: 5649 Date: Date Time: Time User: N/A Computer: ComputerName Description: The receive...

There are several ways of load balancing MSMQ with varying levels of support and efficiency, including: A hardware load balancer (load-balancing on the wire) DNS Round Robin (load-balancing at the outgoing queue) Software-implemented Round...

It is possible to read the documentation for clustering and think that "Active-Passive" means running MSMQ on just one node and "Active-Active" is spreading MSMQ across both nodes, giving you fault tolerance AND load-balancing. Unfortunately this isn...

[[Edited April 2nd, 2009, as my initial understanding of the SVVP was incorrect]] [[Edited September 15th, 2009 to update product list]] There is a useful document out on the subject you may want to read through: BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Hyper...

Back in the old days when MSMQ first came out, machines were pretty static in their configuration. Once you had built them, they didn't change much and the network was always up and running by the time MSMQ started. Even those rich enough to have laptops...

Steven Chen, one of my colleagues over in Shanghai, has posted about his simple sample " which demonstrates how to use raw MSMQ client (based on System.Messaging component) to communicate with WCF msmqIntegrationBinding based service ." Code is available...

My BizTalk knowledge is slowly increasing as I take on more support work. A recent case required investigation into how the DB2 Adapter works when you have multiple instances of the host running so I thought I'd share my findings. The objective was...

Published this month at Microsoft Connect : Product Roadmap for Host Integration Server To help you manage existing systems and plan future deployments of Host Integration Server, we provide the following product roadmap. Host Integration Server...

Browsing around I found Eldar Musayev's " Short history of MSMQ Adapters in BizTalk ". It's a few years old now but I don't think much will change for BizTalk 2009 but I won't know for sure until it releases.

Back in the Windows 2000 era, a common problem was how to recover when MSMQ was allowed to build up over 1.7GB of messages. On startup, MSMQ would try and map into memory all the 4MB files in the System32\MSMQ\Storage directory. The process' virtual memory...

For beginners to MSMQ development, the fact that there are FIVE ways of addressing an MSMQ queue is a real pitfall. Many hours will be lost trying to work out why a seemingly perfect address keeps returning errors. From MSDN: Referencing a Queue...

Working inside Microsoft means you hear a lot of noise about new products. Sometimes it's like a background roar and you need to block it out so you can focus on your job. To reach people like me (the "yeah, whatever" group), there's compulsory on...

Working in Europe, I see a lot of programming code from non-English speakers. One of my Italian colleagues let me in on one of their secrets: "Wherever you see a variable named "pippo", there is an Italian developer." From Wikipedia : ...