A Guided Garden Stroll through the .NET Framework Class Library

Namespace: SYSTEM.MESSAGING

● I am the Messaging Namespace and I am available to help your applications, especially distributed applications, become highly reliable, and am often used to improve response time of server applications during peak processing times.

A good analogy is to think of e-mail. You send a message to someone and unless you hear back otherwise, you assume that recipient got and acted upon the message. Sometimes you need to know that your recipient got the message, and so you ask for a return receipt as proof of delivery or proof of being opened. And sometimes you ask them to reply.

I provide that same functionality for your distributed .NET applications. Messages can be text or binary information. In .NET, you can actually send your .NET business objects as the message payload.

To use messaging, a message queue must exist first on a server that your application can access. And there are private queues and public queues.

I have a class called MessageQueue which has methods, such as GetPublicQueues, to list all the queues available to your application.

Then to send a message into a queue, create a MessageQueue class, check to make sure that the queue you are interested in exists by calling MessageQueue.Exists method, supplying it with the path name of the queue. If all is good, then to send a message, simply call MessageQueue.Path and give it the path name of the queue. Now you are all set to send a message. Call MessageQueue.Send and give that method the message to send, either a string or some other serializable object and a label string. The purpose of the label is to provide a way for a receiving application to know which messages to pick out of the queue.

Receiving messages is about as simple.

I also provide extensive security mechanisms for message queues such as encrypting and decrypting messages for you.