How do I use a remote MSMQ transactionally?

Question

I am writing a Windows service that pulls messages from an MSMQ and posts them to a legacy system (Baan). If the post fails or the machine goes down during the post, I don't want to loose the message. I am therefore using MSMQ transactions. I abort on failure, and I commit on success.

When working against a local queue, this code works well. But in production I will want to separate the machine (or machines) running the service from the queue itself. When I test against a remote queue, an System.Messaging.MessageQueueException is thrown: "The transaction usage is invalid."

I have verified that the queue in question is transactional.

Here's the code that receives from the queue:

// Begin a transaction.
_currentTransaction = new MessageQueueTransaction();
_currentTransaction.Begin();

Message message = queue.Receive(wait ? _queueTimeout : TimeSpan.Zero, _currentTransaction);
_logger.Info("Received a message on queue {0}: {1}.", queue.Path, message.Label);
WORK_ITEM item = (WORK_ITEM)message.Body;
return item;

Answer

I have since switched to SQL Service Broker. It supports remote transactional receive, whereas MSMQ 3.0 does not. And, as an added bonus, it already uses the SQL Server instance that we cluster and back up.

Answer 1

I left a comment asking about the version of MSMQ that you're using, as I think this is the cause of your problem. Transactional Receive wasn't implemented in the earlier versions of MSMQ. If that is the case, then this blog post explains your options.

Answer 2

Using TransactionScope should work provided the MSDTC is running on both machines.

MessageQueue queue = new MessageQueue("myqueue");
using (TransactionScope tx = new TransactionScope()) {
    Message message = queue.Receive(MessageQueueTransactionType.Automatic);
    tx.Complete();
}