Hosting an NServiceBus subscriber in the same application as the producer.

Question

Is it possible to use NServiceBus to publish and consume messages in the same application, specifically a web application?

In the future we will almost certainly need to maintain a separate long running service to process messages generated by this application, and this is why we are hoping to use NServiceBus from the start, but right now it would be nice to just start up the consumer and the publisher when the web application starts. This will make testing and deployment far easier for us.

I presume I will need to reference the NServiceBus.Host.exe and start up the process in the global.asax, but need help on what exactly I need to call to do this.

Answer 1

This is not a mode of deployment that is supported out of the box. While you could make this work by manually creating an additional appdomain for the second NServiceBus endpoint, you'd also likely need to give it a custom configuration source, and of course its own queue.

All in all, I'd recommend keeping it as a separate process, even if it is on the same box. That being said, you can create a second web app to host it rather than using the generic host if you don't want to manage windows services in addition to web apps.

Hope that helps.