MSMQ for Managing Threads?!

Question

I am building an application where I have inputs from printers over the network (on specific ports) and other files which are created into a folder locally or through the network. The user can create different threads to monitor different folders at the same time, as well as threads to handle the input from threes printers over the network. The application is supposed to process the input data according to its type and output it. On the other end of the application, there would be 4 threads waiting for input data from the input threads (could be 10 or 20 threads) to process and apply 4 different tasks. As we will have many threads running at the same time, I thought I would use MSMQ to manage these threads. Does using MSMQ fit in this scenario or should I use another technique? Managing these threads in terms of scheduling, prioritizing, etc.

(P.S: I was thinking to build my own ThreadEngine class that will take care of all of these things until I heard about MSMQ, which am still not sure if it’s the right thing to use)

Answer 1

MSMQ is a system message queue, not a thread pool manager.

Answer 2

MSMQ would be useful for managing your input/output data not for your threads. .Net already has the ThreadPool, the CCR and the TPL to assist you with concurrency and multithreading so I would suggest reading up on those technologies and choosing the most appropriate one.