Move over MSMQ, Service Bus for Windows Server was recently released. Apparently it has been for awhile now (Oct 2012 release). I’m just late to the party I guess.
Service Bus 1.0 was designed to allow for enterprise messaging capabilities in a Windows Server-based environment. It enables you to build, test, and run loosely-coupled, message-driven applications in self-managed environments and on developer computers. The two primary features are Service Bus Queues and Service Bus Topics and Subscriptions.
- Service Bus Queues offer reliable message storage and retrieval with a choice of protocols and APIs. Use Service Bus queue in your application to provide load leveling by having the message receiver processing messages at its own pace or to provide load balancing by having multiple, competing receivers accepting messages from the same queue.
For more information on Service Bus queues refer to How to Use Service Bus Queues.
- Service Bus Topics and Subscriptions offer (in addition to all of the queue’s) rich publish-subscribe capabilities allowing multiple, concurrent subscribers to independently retrieve filtered or unfiltered views of the published message stream.
If you are interested in or use messaging technology within your applications, this is some pretty exciting news. Service Bus for Windows Server provides the same capabilities (Message Queues, Pub/Sub) as the Windows Azure Service Bus. Best of all, it’s free.
It’s available for download now. Also, check out the MSDN documentation.