Expert Days 2008

Last Monday, I delivered an MSMQ training session in Expert Days 2008 (Warning- this link is in Hebrew :-)), organized by Expert4D. I had a small group of six devoted students from the Israeli Army, Orange telecom, and E&C Medical Intelligence (an interesting start-up developing solutions for Obstetrics), and another company I can’ remember right now (please respond to this point and remind me).

You can see the original syllabus of the training here.

How did it go? I started as planned, with a "getting started" session in which I showed how to transfer a simple "draw" program to bulleting board "disdraw" program. This is actually a variation of the first MSMQ demo I developed in 1995 for "Falcon" (later named MSMQ) technology preview. I really like this demo because it can clearly and visually show store-and-forward, addressing, multicast and more. You can see the source of the demo here.

To my surprise, I was actually able to develop the MSMQ part on stage and I did not need the backup solution I prepared. The gods of the demo were on my side this time! I wonder what are the odds of this to happen….

I continued with addressing, using the same program to demonstrate multiple readers from the same queue, multicast, MQF (multiple queue format) and HTTP addressing. Again I remembered why I like "disdraw" – when you put multiple readers on the same queue you see that each of them gets a part (dotted line…) of the complete draw, but when you use MQF to send to several queues and put a reader on each queue, each reader gets the full drawing.

The upper "disdraw" sends the drawing to "formatname:direct=os:.\private$\q1,direct=os:.\private$\q2,direct=os:.\private$\q3" (MQF). The readers in the middle reads the drawing from q1, the reader in the bottom left reads from q2, and in the bottom right – from q3. I hope you can see that the readers that read from q1 gets only part of the original drawing while the readers in the bottom get it all.

I tried to demonstrate multicast but the network I got seems to block it… Next time I should use virtual servers for that.

After lunch, I decided to use the second half of the day for "by request" sessions.

The people from E&C Medical asked to learn more on C++ APIs and I also got a request to learn how to use MSMQ from Javascript. I found a presentation delivered in 1998 by my boss – "Mr. MSMQ" Raphi Renous that covers both C++ and COM APIs. You can see it here . It looks like good old horses do not die that fast 🙂

Later, I used an excellent presentation that Shai Kariv delivered in DevCom 2002 (another proof that old horses do not die that fast) to demonstrate the MSMQ multicasting.

After talking about quality of service, recoverable messages and express messages (did you know that express messages are also saved to disk? I think I should devote a blog to that…), we talked about the MSMQ WMI provider (see my blog from April 2), and then we moved on to talk about new features – MSMQ 4.0 and WCF.

For WCF, I used two presentations I really like – one is the Teacher / Student presentation (WPF based "disdraw") by Pedram Rezaei . WPF makes it look much nicer than the original disdraw 🙂 and it also shows how you can easily switch between http and msmq bindings. The only downside of this presentation is that the teacher empties its queue as it starts, so you can’t really demo a student that starts before the teacher – a benefit of using MSMQ. I will fix this some day…

We ended the day by demonstrating sub-queues using Windows Vista’s Computer Management (actually we could overcome the message deletion in the student / teacher demo by "hiding" messages in sub-queue while the teacher canvas starts…), and then I showed the excellent presentation of Justin Wilcox on the MSMQ bindings in WCF .

I want to use this opportunity to thank Eyal Vardi and Sharon Ezra from Expert4D for organizing the Expert Days 2008 . Note that the Expert Days continue at the end of August – so you can still register for additional sessions (if you care in Israel and speak Hebrew).

Interested in attending similar sessions? Please let me know. I can also customize one for your company if needed.

Comments are welcome,

Yoel