What are some good technologies in .NET that allow for queueing / dequeuing xml strings?

Question

We are currently using a custom queueing system where a table in a SQL Server 2008 database has an xml column with some additional data. We use this when we serialize our objects to XML and store them in this table. Later, another application simply dequeues these items, deserializes them into the same object and preforms a certain task depending on the type of object etc...

The current disadvantage is that searching for a specific word in an XML column can be a real pain.

Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

This sounds like something you may want to use a message queue for.

.Net provides a number of classes in the System.Messaging namespace, including MessageQueue that meake it easy to interact with message queues (which are available as part of the OS).

You can also use WCF to program against messages queues and dynamically retrieve and dispatch messages based on their content.

Message queues support transactions, guaranteed delivery, and storage of arbitrarily large objects. However, they are not intended as a repository - so if you need to persist or retrain the data of messages, or index or search against them after they have been processed, they may not be the right solution for you.