Motley Queüe

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) provides a powerful programming model to develop service-oriented applications. MSMQ integrates very well with WCF so queued applications can be developed using WCF. WCF provides two bindings that support MSMQ -...

Edited on 4/11/2008 to corrected the build numbers in the examples. The correct build number is 6.0.6000.16386. Vista introduces a new tool for installing and removing Optional Components, called OCSetup.exe. For those of you familiar with Package...

Two New Operating Systems Bring Two New, Exciting Ways to Install (or Uninstall) MSMQ This week we talk about automated installation (and new in Vista and Windows Server 2008, uninstallation) of MSMQ via unattend files. The Optional Component setup...

Should your app be using System.Messaging or WCF Queuing ? We’ve all seen these kind of technology comparisons before — someone extols the virtues of two solutions, highlights the pros and cons in certain situations, and ultimately answers the comparison...

A very user friendly administrator UI tool for creating, configuring and managing MSMQ Clusters While this isn’t really a new MSMQ clustering feature, it’s worth being mentioned first. If you have used Win2k3 Cluster’s Cluster Admin UI, you will find...

I have come across this question of whether JMS and MSMQ are interoperabe a number of times and so I decided to address it. Microsoft does not have a JMS provider for MSMQ so basically you will need to use a third party product or implement your own JMS...

MSMQ provides several sets of performance counters which query the state of the service and other objects (sessions, queues, etc.) and can be used in various monitoring systems. There are a few KB articles and blog entries explaining things you need to...

As part of a general security sweep of Vista and Windows Server 2008, there was a review of the cryptographic algorithms used anywhere within the products. Some of the older ones were deprecated as being too weak to provide meaningful security anymore...

Patrick Toolis of the MSMQ test team has written a great whitepaper on using LINQ (Language-Integrated Query) with MSMQ via system.messaging. It's twelve pages long with a number of screenshots and diagrams, so I'm not going to try to post it directly...

There are a few different ways of getting a count of the number of messages in the MessageQueue. Here’s a simple one. public static int GetMessageCount( MessageQueue q) { int messageCount = 0; using ( MessageEnumerator messageEnumerator...

Let’s say you want to install all components except Downlevel Client Support on a Windows Server 2003 computer. You could run the following command: sysocmgr /i:sysoc.inf /x /u:unattend.ini with following unattend.ini file: [Version] Signature...

Windows Server 2008 has a nifty new command line tool called ServerManagerCmd.exe which makes installing and uninstalling Optional Components and Server Roles quick and easy. It is not related to the Package Manager/OCSetup family of tools, so although...

There are a few differences in MSMQ and IIS functionality between Windows Server 2003 (MSMQ v3.0) and Windows Server 2008 (MSMQ v4.0). This means that there are a few configuration changes you may have to make to your MSMQ system post-upgrade to make...

An issue that frequently causes confusion for MSMQ users is that of message encryption. A message is marked for encryption and sent off, but when it shows up in the destination queue the contents are plainly viewable in clear text. What’s going on here...

There are a number of factors that can affect the performance of your enterprise application that uses MSMQ with WCF. Nicholas Allen discusses some of these design decisions in his Optimizing MSMQ article. Another good reference is Best Practices for...

One of the basic principles of MSMQ's design is that sender and receiver are decoupled. The sending application does not need to know whether the receiving application is running or even reachable under current network conditions: it can just send, and...

Windows Server 2008 R2 introduces a new feature in Active Directory, the Active Directory Recycle Bin. When MSMQ is installed on a domain-joined machine with the MSMQ directory integration feature installed, it makes use of Active Directory objects, particularly...

I was called on to assist recently in diagnosing why an MSMQ client was unable to send messages to a queue on a server. One of the things the owner of the machines did was take a network trace on the client of the connection attempt, and what I saw there...

In the computer sense, which we're discussing here, queuing is a way to get bundles of data, normally referred to as messages, from one program to another. Most descriptions of queuing use a postal metaphor, probably because it's a very good one: queuing...

Just as with authentication, the security sweep for Vista and Windows Server 2008 had an effect on MSMQ's encryption feature. In previous versions, MSMQ offered two "privacy levels", BASE and ENHANCED. The two levels reflected the length of the keys used...

In MSMQ, there are two important kinds of entities. As you might expect, they are messages and queues. To MSMQ, a message is a bundle of properties. The thing you normally think of as being the message, the actual content, is one of those properties...

Timeouts, acknowledgements, and deadlettering, working together, will help you deal with not just the situation where a remote queue doesn't exist, but all the other things which could go wrong along a message's way from sender to destination. MSMQ...

MSMQ has supported receiving messages from queues hosted on other machines ("remote receive") since the beginning. However, remote receives within a transaction have not been supported. That's a significant detail, and has generated a lot of customer...

Hello and welcome back from the holidays! I will get around to describing how to use acknowledgements and deadlettering soon, but right now, those of you who are already using acknowledgements should know that there is a slight behavior change coming...

I'm not the only one writing about MSMQ. You probably know that already — you probably arrived here via a link from one of them! But if you didn't, check out the new Links section on the left. John Breakwell and Muhammed Ismail have been working with...