Question

When using MSMQ and WCF, please describe the algorithm/rules which decide the URI of the dead letter queue?

For example: net.msmq://localhost/private/MyQueue;DeadLetter or net.msmq://localhost/system$;DeadLetter or something else?

I ask because I found a Transcender question where I disagree about the answer, but I haven’t been able to find a clear definition which describes exactly the rules. I have checked MSDN and both fish books.

Answer 1

According to the MSDN docs, this is your answer:

Reading Messages from the Dead-Letter Queue

An application that reads messages out of a dead-letter queue is
similar to a WCF service that reads from an application queue, except
for the following minor differences:

To read messages from a system transactional dead-letter queue, the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) must be of the form:
net.msmq://localhost/system$;DeadXact

To read messages from a system non-transactional dead-letter queue, the URI must be of the form:
net.msmq://localhost/system$;DeadLetter

You don’t have a dead-letter queue per URL / service but one per system/machine.