Early chapters look at the rich design possibilities of MSMQ, including reliable asynchronous communications (where parties do not have to be online together) and today's three-tiered architectures (where business rules are kept on the server). From this general perspective, Designing Applications with MSMQ moves to practical examples of an MSMQ program written two ways: through COM objects that work with tools, such as Visual Basic and Visual C++, and a more basic C API. Once a simple MSMQ program is created, the author shows how it can be enhanced, by making it asynchronous, for instance, for offline message delivery.
A tour of MSMQ's security features and support for transactions follows, including when and how to use Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) with MSMQ. (Besides an introduction to these Microsoft technologies, the author does a fine job of explaining transaction processing in general.) The included appendix features a full reference on all nine MSMQ COM objects, plus the MSMQ C API. --Richard Dragan