Using MSMQ - System.Messaging versus WCF

I think this quote from the "Motley Queue" web site ("web": excellent link!) sums it up best:

*The WCF programming model is centered around your business operations. With it, you can stop managing your message transactions, setting message properties, searching for messages in a queue, checking for NACKS, retrying messages, etc. Instead you can start thinking of the world in terms of business operations (e.g. CreatePurchaseOrder) and focus on your business logic. Leave the tedium to WCF. *

That is in a nutshell what WCF tries to accomplish - relieve you of a lot of plumbing and intricasies and let you concentrate on your business problems you want to solve.

My vote is in for WCF! :-)

Marc

You should check out the Motley Queue website. There is a good comparison on System.Messaging vs WCF. WCF is going to be much cleaner and easier to use.

I sort of disagree whether WCF is easier/cleaner than System.Messaging, which, let's face it, has a pretty simple API (overall) and is relatively simple to use, if that's all you care about. However, WCF does have some nice things, but it is not simple by any means.

As for whether you'll find any problems, well... that depends a lot on how your VB application is currently using MSMQ and what kind of data it is sending. You'll be using the MsmqIntegrationBinding binding, which helps somewhat, but you might have to pull some tricks to handle message deserialization successufully if your VB app doesn't send messages in a format WCF can deal out of the box with.