Question

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();         }      } } 

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