Its been over a year since I went down the messaging path and how has it been? What have a learned? What has sucked? The following are some thoughts on my experiences with deploying MassTransit

Although explaining the benefits of a messaging based system has been easy, trying to apply some of the new paradigms that Udi and Greg Young have been trying to pound into my skull has not been so easy. This includes a slew of things like message idempotence, worrying about message timeout (and elevating its importance in the whole system), what to do when a message doesn't get where its supposed to go, figuring out how to rerun a messaging system, and others has been a bit of a mind warp. And figuring out how to test a messaging system...that took a while too. My team has pushed pretty hard in these areas and although it took a little while I think we are starting to see the seeds of our effort. I guess the take away here is that its just going to take time

I know that I am still in the early stages of use for this pattern / style of development and further more as a developer of the framework I can get a bit excited about using it, but at times I think I am treating the tool a bit like a 'hammer and that everything is a nail' but its hard to know when it makes sense and when it doesn't. My hope is that I continue to experience more and more use, that I can find that line sooner rather than later. Its like, oh that could be a useful event that the accounting system is closed. Then we build it up as an event and broadcast the account totals out to our systems that are interested. Right now we have just one system and my coworkers and I kinda stand back and say "Really?" that could have just been a file transfer. I know though as soon as we get that second system we will be very happy.

Another thing that seems to be happening is that I am writing an awful lot of windows services. One to broadcast the message and one to receive the message. Not really sure if this is good or bad or anything, but it did allow me to sit back and create Topshelf an OSS library for writing windows services (imagine that), and from what I have heard it seems to be working out quite well for people. But its something that is new to me, and I just don't have the experience writing that kind of code. But it seems to be going well, it just adds a lot of stuff that I am not used to watching. Thankfully log4net is quickly becoming a very near and dear friend.

As I imagine writing all of these services, so that I can integrate all of my organization I am also starting to wonder about how in the heck I am going to manage this multitude of services. Documentation will help alot, but I am lazy and don't want to write documentation. So how can I expose information about our systems with out having to keep it in sync with the word docs? This is where I have started to look into the concept of metadata. Basically, i want an MT service to tell me something about itself. Where is it installed, how many messages is it handling per minute, error count, etc. I feel that if I can get this baked into MT and exposed to us in some sort of dashboard, managing this beast will get a lot easier.

Well, I hope this was helpful. I will try to write another one when it seems to make sense.

-d