Microsoft® Windows® Communication Foundation Step by Step

Using Message Queues

Message queues are the ultimate in asynchronous technology. Message queues can provide a durable, reliable, transacted transport for messages. Furthermore, a client application sending messages, and a service receiving them, do not have to be running at the same time. There is a price you pay for this flexibility though: message queues are an inherently one-way transport, so implementing applications and services that send requests and expect to receive responses requires a lot of careful design. Message queues are also slower than other transports, primarily because of their reliability and durability; the Windows operating system stores messages in files on disk. This means that messages held in a message queue can survive ...