Specific advantages of NServiceBus over plain RabbitMQ

Question

Are there any advantages of using NServiceBus over simply using the .net driver for RabbitMQ (assuming we can replace MSMQ with AMQP). Does NSB provide any additional functionality or abstractions that are not available directly in AMQP.

Answer 1

Main advantages include (but are not limited to):

• Takes care of serialization/deserialization of messages.
• Provides a neat model for dispatching messages w. handlers, polymorphic dispatch, arranging handlers in a pipeline etc.
• Handles unit of work.
• Provides a neat saga implementation.
• Gives you a host process that can be F5-debugged as well as installed as a Windows service.

These are things, that you'd need to roll yourself, if you were to use the RabbitMQ .NET client directly - unless, of course, you don't need any of these things.

Oh, and if you use MSMQ instead of RabbitMQ, you can get all these things in a broker-less model :)

Answer 2

NSB most often uses MSMQ as the underlying transport. It could use RabbitMQ or some other AMQP compliant transport. NSB provides support for all the basic messaging patterns including point to point communication, pub/sub etc. The decision to use a particular transport would be different than that of choosing NSB itself. It has many features and you can get and idea from the Documentation page.