How do I handle message failure in MSMQ bindings for WCF

Question

I have create a WCF service and am utilising netMsmqBinding binding.

This is a simple service that passes a Dto to my service method and does not expect a response. T

Answer 1

There's a sample in the SDK that might be useful in your case. Basically, what it does is attach an IErrorHandler implementation to your service that will catch the error when WCF declares the message to be "poison" (i.e. when all configured retries have been exhausted). What the sample does is move the message to another queue and then restart the ServiceHost associated with the message (since it will have faulted when the poison message was found).

It's not a very pretty sample, but it can be useful. There are a couple of limitations, though:

1- If you have multiple endpoints associated with your service (i.e. exposed through several queues), there's no way to know which queue the poison message arrived in. If you only have a single queue, this won't be a problem. I haven't seen any official workaround for this, but I've experimented with one possible alternative which I've documented here: http://winterdom.com/weblog/2008/05/27/NetMSMQAndPoisonMessages.aspx

2- Once the problem message is moved to another queue, it becomes your responsibility, so it's up to you to move it back to the processing queue once the timeout is done (or attach a new service to that queue to handle it).

To be honest, in either case, you're looking at some "manual" work here that WCF just doesn't cover on it's own.

I've been recently working on a different project where I have a requirement to explicitly control how often retries happen, and my current solution was to create a set of retry queues and manually move messages between the retry queues and the main processing queue based on a set of timers and some heuristics, just using the raw System.Messaging stuff to handle the MSMQ queues. It seems to work pretty nicely, though there are a couple of gotchas if you go this way.