ASP.NET - best queue system for a new application

Question

My organization is getting ready to implement a new system, which is a asp.net application. The application will have a large queue of offline work that is initiated by the website. This queue will hold different types of activity, ideally in XML messages. Think of things like email notifications, scheduled tasks, etc.

In the past, the organization would likely have used MSMQ to accomplish this task. However, they consider MSMQ to be old school (and I partly agree with them), so we are going to do an architectural review to determine the "best" solution.

In my mind, there are a few potential choices:

1. Stick with a new implementation on the latest version of MSMQ - not ideal, but a known product.
2. Use Windows Workflow Foundation, which I've heard from a few other developers that have used this for this type of thing.
3. Develop a custom database solution.

Am I missing any obvious solutions? This ideally will be a Microsoft product, but really just needs to work in a Microsoft centric shop.

I'm concerned about the following:
1. Ease of implementation and maintenance
2. A solution which will be around for awhile
3. Able to handle a good volume of rows, with medium sized XML data in them
4. Absolutely reliable queue system, with quick updating (multiple utility processes will likely be grabbing records out of the queue to process them).

Answer 1

Reading the post seems like the only reason you think MSMQ is not suitable is because someone thinks it is "old school". I would not think that is a good enough reason not to use it, since it looks like your company has experience with it, so there would be no learning curve, and that means easy implementation and maintenance.

Plus, MSMQ would perfectly address all the concerns you mentioned you have. So, unless there is another "real" reason not to use it, I would think stick with MSMQ.

Answer 2

I would suggest looking into WCF, you can configure it to specify persistent, queued messaging and it uses MSMQ technology under the covers. The WCF abstraction/interface and technology should be around for a good long time.

Answer 3

I agree with moose-in-the-jungle that MSMQ probably is what you should stick with.

I would maybe research some alternative API's that use MSMQ under the cover, like nServiceBus from Udi Dahan.

Answer 4

As an alternative to ActiveMQ (mentioned above) there is open-source RabbitMQ. From what they say it integrates nicely with ASP.NET and WCF.

http://www.rabbitmq.com/