MSMQ Poison Message Handling

Question

Hello,

How would I handle poison messages when not using WCF? The code below creates a loop, and I was curious if MSMQ provided a system to automatically handle poison messages.

MessageQueue mq = new MessageQueue(@".\Private$\My/Queue");

while (true)
{
    using (MessageQueueTransaction _transaction = 
            new MessageQueueTransaction())
    {
        _transaction.Begin();

        try
        {
            Message msg = mq.Receive(_transaction);

            //HandleMessage(msg);
            throw new Exception("Kaboom!");            

            _transaction.Commit();
        }
        catch (Exception ex)
        {
            _transaction.Abort();
        }

    }
}

Thanks! James

Answer 1

I don't believe there is a simple way to handle poison messages using raw System.Messaging classes. I think the simplest solution is to set the "TimeToBeReceived" property on a message, but this is not perfect, because you may end up losing valid messages if the receiver is offline. I read somewhere that you can have real poison message handling in MSMQ using PInvoke, but was unable to find any resources on this.

I found this article with some ideas on how to manually handle poison messages. It might offer some ideas:

http://www.cogin.com/articles/SurvivingPoisonMessages.php