MsmqIntegrationBinding Vs NetMsmqBinding

Question

I know we can use the above bindings for MSMQ Applications.

Is this consumable by other clients(Apart from .net) also ?

What is the difference...? Some real time examples ll help me.

Thanks

Answer 1

They're pretty different bindings (even if they share a large implementation base in MsmqBindingBase) and NetMsmqBinding can be used only with other .NET WCF clients. MsmqIntegrationBinding is intended to be used when your application must interop with older applications (in any language) that use MSMQ for communication, from MSDN:

This binding [MsmqIntegrationBinding] can be used to enable WCF applications to send and receive messages to and from existing MSMQ applications that use COM, native C++ APIs or the types defined in the System.Messaging namespace.

Most evident differences between these bindings can be summarized in what MsmqIntegrationBinding lacks of:

• Security support is pretty trivial (what about security channels?).
• Contracts interface is more limited (because it must interop with non .NET applications).
• Syntax for addresses is different from other WCF bindings (take a look to EndpointAddress in the examples in MSDN).
• You can't use all the messages' features (encoding, for example).

For more details about this take a look to this blog post about MsmqIntegrationBinding in WCF.

Then when to use them? I think any new WCF application should always use the NetMsmqBinding, keeping MsmqIntegrationBinding only for compatibility with existing applications. From MSDN:

The NetMsmqBinding binding provides support for queuing by using Message Queuing (MSMQ) as a transport and enables support for loosely-coupled applications, failure isolation, load leveling and disconnected operations.