How can we use MSMQ bindings in WCF?

First let us understand why MSMQ came in to picture and then rest will follow. Let us take a scenario where your client needs to upload data to a central server. If everything will works fine and the server is available 24 hours to client then there are no issues. In case the server is not available, the clients will fail and the data will not be delivered. There is where MSMQ comes in to picture. It eliminates the need of persistent connection to a server. Therefore, what you do is deploy a MSMQ server and let the clients post message to this MSMQ server. When your actual server runs, it just picks up the message from the queue. In short, neither the client nor the server needs to be up and running on the same time. In WCF we have a client and service model and in real world it is very much practical possible that both the entities will not be available at one time.
In order to use MSMQ you need to install the Message queuing by click on Install windows component and selecting MSMQ queuing. Once that done we are all set to make our sample of MSMQ using WCF

 Figure 22:- MSMQ Installation

This sample will be simple. We send some messages from the client and keep the server down. As the server is down it will make postings to the MSMQ server. Then we will run the server service and service should pick up the message and display the same.

Figure 23:- MSMQ Server side code walkthrough

Above snippet is the server side code. So let us understand the whole snippet:-
1 – First thing is the queue name where the messages will go if the server is not running. The server name we can get from the config file. You can see in the above snippet we have defined the Mismanage in App.config file.
2 – We first check does this queue exist if it exists then go-ahead. If not then go to create a queue. Please note you need import using System. Messaging namespace. Then we can use the Message Queue to create a queue if the queue does not exist.
3 – First thing which should surprise you is why we are creating a URI with HTTP protocol as we are going to use MSMQ. Ok! This is bit tricky but fun. As we know in order to connect to this service, we need to generate a client proxy using SVCUTIL. Therefore, this URI will help us do that. It is not actually used by the client to connect.
4 – We need our end and the MSMQ bindings.
5 and 6 – Again as usual we need is an interface and implementation for the same. In implementation we have created a method called send Message.
Once the above steps are executed, run the server and generate the client proxy using SVCUTIL utility.
Now comes the final step making a client. One change you need to make is change the address to the MSMQ server in the app.config. In this, we have just looped ten times and fired an offline message. Please note to keep your server down.

Figure 24:- MSMQ Client side code

Now go to computer management and you can see your queue messages waiting to be picked by the server. Run the server and below should be the output. If you come back again you will see that there are no messages in the queue.

Figure 25:- MSMQ Server side display

One of the important concepts is to understand when to use MSMQ protocol. When we expect that client and server will not be available, at one time this is the best option to opt for.