Skip to main content

Windows Azure Service Bus - Schedule Message Delivery

Windows Azure Service Bus became a powerful mechanism to distribute messages in applications that are hosted in a cloud environment or in a system that has access to internet.
When we are using this service to notify different state change, I had moments when I need to signal a state change only after a specific time interval. To be able to support this functionality we need to be able to add the message to the topic only after the specific time elapsed. This means that we need to implement a component that can store this messages for a specific time interval. We will publish this message only after the specific time interval.
A new feature was added to Windows Azure Service Bus message. This new feature give us the possibility to make a message available in the topic only from a specific time. We can forget the component that we talked some lines ago. From now, this is supported by default. We have the support to specific the time from when the message will be available – in UTC format.
Before starting using this, we need to know a very important thing. This new feature guarantee that the message will be available only after the specific time, BUT we don’t have the guaranty that the message will be available from the next second. Based on the load of our Service Bus, this message can be made available on the specific time interval or after few seconds.
In the next example we will see how we create a message (BrokeredMessage) and specific the time when it will be available on the topic.
// Create the message
DateTime availableFromInUTC  = ... 
BrokeredMessage msg = new BrokeredMessage("some content");
msg.ScheduledEnqueueTimeUtc = availableFromUTC;

// Create message sender
MessagingFactory messageFactory = 
    MessagingFactory.CreateFromConnectionString(connectionString);
MessageSender messageSender = messageFactory.CreateMessageSender("topic1");

// Send the message to the topic
messageSender.Send(msg);
Another great feature on Windows Azure Service Bus.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How to audit an Azure Cosmos DB

In this post, we will talk about how we can audit an Azure Cosmos DB database. Before jumping into the problem let us define the business requirement: As an Administrator I want to be able to audit all changes that were done to specific collection inside my Azure Cosmos DB. The requirement is simple, but can be a little tricky to implement fully. First of all when you are using Azure Cosmos DB or any other storage solution there are 99% odds that you’ll have more than one system that writes data to it. This means that you have or not have control on the systems that are doing any create/update/delete operations. Solution 1: Diagnostic Logs Cosmos DB allows us activate diagnostics logs and stream the output a storage account for achieving to other systems like Event Hub or Log Analytics. This would allow us to have information related to who, when, what, response code and how the access operation to our Cosmos DB was done. Beside this there is a field that specifies what was th...

Can User Technical Profile Influence AI Architecture Decisions?

In the last few days, I ran a small experiment on Devin/Windsurf/Cascade, BMAD, and LLM-based architecture decisions. The initial concern was simple: if an AI coding assistant knows something about the user, for example, that the user is a Java developer or a .NET developer, can this information influence the architecture and technology stack that the AI will propose? This question is important because many companies are starting to use AI tools not only for coding but also for product discovery, architecture, documentation, and technical decision-making. If the AI is influenced by the developer's personal profile, the result may not be fully neutral. It may look like a business or architecture decision, but in reality, it may be partially shaped by the context of the person using the tool. The test was done using BMAD with Devin/Windsurf/Cascade. The scenario was a unified field service operations platform. The task was to let BMAD refine the product, define the architecture and s...

ADO.NET provider with invariant name 'System.Data.SqlClient' could not be loaded

Today blog post will be started with the following error when running DB tests on the CI machine: threw exception: System.InvalidOperationException: The Entity Framework provider type 'System.Data.Entity.SqlServer.SqlProviderServices, EntityFramework.SqlServer' registered in the application config file for the ADO.NET provider with invariant name 'System.Data.SqlClient' could not be loaded. Make sure that the assembly-qualified name is used and that the assembly is available to the running application. See http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=260882 for more information. at System.Data.Entity.Infrastructure.DependencyResolution.ProviderServicesFactory.GetInstance(String providerTypeName, String providerInvariantName) This error happened only on the Continuous Integration machine. On the devs machines, everything has fine. The classic problem – on my machine it’s working. The CI has the following configuration: TeamCity .NET 4.51 EF 6.0.2 VS2013 It see...