More messaging like Rabbits

After playing around some with RabbitMQ I decided I’d really let BizTalk message like rabbits.  I modified the file send port so that it sent back to the same queue instead of to the file location.  This creates a feedback loop so a message will keep propagating.  Then to make it more “rabbit like” I added a send port group that had the filter: BTS.ReceivePortName == RMQI_Q_Receive Or BTS.ReceivePortName == RMQI_Receive_Start

This way starting with the first message received from the file drop; every message receive results in two sends to the queue (which just feeds back and results in another doubling of messages). 

Two things became readily apparent.  BizTalk scales well and works fast and RabbitMQ will certainly keep pace.  In moments I had thousands of messages flying through my system. 

Checking the Queues section of the RabbitMQ management portal I was easily able to see the volume flowing through.  I almost think this could be a good benchmarking tool for BizTalk, but the BizTalk Benchmark Wizard is already so good I don’t really think I need a RabbitMQ based one. 

Messaging like Rabbits

I have been all kinds of excited about AMQP lately and yesterday’s news from David Ingham about AMQP on Service Bus got me pretty excited.  Obviously I’m always excited about BizTalk and my work lately has pushed me far heavier into the WCF-Adapters than I had previously gone (including using WCF 4.5 features from within BizTalk 2010). 

Eager to try some AMQP out and not willing to wait I decided I’d give RabbitMQ a try.  I knew they had a WCF binding for their implementation and decided it would probably be a good place to start.  This way I could placate my “open source” critics and also get some good AMQP fun going on Windows… quickly (I’m told AMQP works on Linux too). 

The setup was pretty easy for the server aspect, but the client part was not so much.  Leonid Ganeline’s awesome TechNet article on this helped me very much: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/7401.biztalk-and-rabbitmq.aspx.

I knew I had to GAC the assemblies and register the binding in machine.config, but I couldn’t find the assemblies anywhere (neither could Leonid), so I ended up building them locally (though you can strong name assemblies after they’re compiled I instead just added a key and strong named them).  I also changed the target to .NET 4.0.  You need to compile RabbitMQ.Client and RabbitMQ.ServiceModel.

I followed a very similar pattern with a file drop that Leonid did and it worked great.  I’m playing around with the graphical tools (management console) for RabbitMQ and I still don’t really know what many of these defaults are, but I do plan to work on it a bit more.