Key Benefits of MSMQ

Question

I have seen many socket application in which there is use of MSMQ. But when I go in details I think that we can do it without MSMQ also, so I want to know what is key benefit of MSMQ. Why should someone use MSMQ in his own application.

Answer 1

MSMQ is a great piece of Windows. It is basically a message-oriented middleware that helps a lot in some software architectures.

This mainly addresses the common use case of asynchronous message processing: you have a service Service1 that communicates (send messages) with another part of your software architecture, say Service2.

Main problem: what if Service2 becomes suddenly unavailable? Will messages be lost? If you use MSMQ it won't: Service1 will send messages into a queue, and Service2 will dequeue when it is available.

MSMQ will resolve following common issues:

• temporary unavailability of a service: messages are persisted on the disk and will be dequeued when the service becomes available again, so no messages are lost
• as it's fully asynchronous, it'll help a lot in case of punctual peak load: your Service2 won't die under the heavy load, it'll just dequeue and process messages, one after one

Pros of MSMQ vs another message-oriented middleware:

• free and built-in (shipped with Windows)
• light
• good integration with other Microsoft products (for instance there is the System.Messaging namespace in .Net to deal with MSMQ)
• monitoring capabilities (using perfmon counters: number of message received per second...)
• transactional queues
• persistence on disk so messages are never lost
• available through the network (remote queues)