Is the any free library that implements message queuing similar to MSMQ (Microsoft Message Queuing)?

Question

I am interested in using a free library that has features similar to MSMQ to send/receive messages among 3 app domains in a win form application. I only need the private queue functionality (No public queues or AD support) Please provide links and some advantages/disadvantages . I am happy to open sub questions if you think you need more points for finer details.

Note: Unfortunately I have some users that do not have Windows XP professional edition (MSMQ is not available) I saw Apache ActiveMQ and rabbit MQ but it seems a bit overkill for what I need to do. http://activemq.apache.org/ http://www.rabbitmq.com/ It is possible to implement this feature using a singleton Queue protected by a named mutex, but I would not like to spend the time if somebody has already done it.

Answer 1

There is Rhino Queues. The author is considered to be a pretty good developer.

Answer 2

If it's all in the same application then sharing a synchronized queue is what you want, have a look at the Queue.Synchronized method in MSDN, that provides you with a thread-safe queue.

Answer 3

You might want to look at Retlang http://code.google.com/p/retlang/

Answer 4

How about NServiceBus using the shared memory transport? The creator, Udi Dahan, is a well respected individual in the message based architecture space.

Answer 5

At some point, there is going to have to be some client specific code to accept messages. If the users need to accept messages on their machines, it sounds like a smart client situation. In the Windows world, there is a smart client which does messaging, and allows users to work with data in a disconnected way.

I can't imagine any one library which will allow messaging on different operating systems. Even if a singleton is used, there has to be some cross-platform way to send/receive the messages. It seems like the client end would always have to be OS specific.

It might be possible to try Mono on the non-windows side. There is a tool you can use to see if a third party library has dependencies which will not run in Mono. It was released with the Mono tools for Visual Studio. It is called the Mono Migration Analyzer (MoMA).