I love that Microsoft has put the
PDC presentations online, and unlike the
US TechEd prsentations, has left the questions in at the end. They've been very useful in helping to
sort out the
Microsoft Messaging message. Here's one more piece of the puzzle that I found at the end of
Steve Swartz's excellent
WSV 403 Indigo Coming Attractions presentation when he was asked 'How do you implement something like MSMQ with Indigo?'
MSMQ kind of semantics can be implemented [in Indigo] in two ways: They can be implemented inside a channel, or out in an application serving as an intermediary.
Indigo comes with a channel called the reliable channel that implements point-to-point buffering, point-to point-queuing - so that you can be on a laptop sending messages to me. The messages stay in a buffer. Later your app goes away, I connect, the messages get sent to me, I reply, the messages sit in a buffer, later your app comes out and drains them.
Or I can build a queue intermediary. Indigo V1 will ship with a queue class that you can put in an intermediary sitting at an address. You can put messages to that and you can pull messages from it.
So those are the two options depending on whether you think of a transport kind of thing - so the semantics of me talking to you - or whether it’s a real thing that sits between your and app and the user of the app, where many people may be writing to the same queue and many apps might be reading from it.
Over time - Indigo is a long plan - in Indigo v1 we will be releasing classes, so that you can build queues. Over time we will be implementing 'queue services' - full bore services that known about clusters and the whole thing. Parts of MSMQ wont be in v1. The programmer part will be, but the big old configurable server side wont be.
So, the programming model is there for V1, but a replacement for the enterprise aspects of MSMQ will have to wait until the future. This would cover the apps where I've message queue in the past (basically a private queue that one app can post to independent of another that reads the messages off), though its not (yet) the replacement to Tibco I was hoping for.