Does MassTransit support MSMQ over HTTP transport?

Question

HTTP transfer has been available since MSMQ 3.0, however I'm afraid MassTransit doesn't offer the feature to use HTTP protocol as transport protocol between queues.

There's a very similar question about this here, which has not been completely answered.

Does anyone know if it's possible for a client to subscribe to a bus and send/receive messages through HTTP? Here's the architecture I'm willing to implement:

I'll have 2 computers in the local network

• Computer A runs a server application and MassTransit.RuntimeServices
• Computer B runs a client application which sends messages to A

I want the communication between them to be done via http.

I tried to change the address in UseSubscriptionService to http instead of msmq, but it doesn't work. If I set computer's A MSMQ service to Hardened Mode, the client application running on computer B get's a timeout while trying to subscribe to mt_subscriptions.

Bus.Initialize(sbc =>
            {
                sbc.UseMsmq();
                sbc.VerifyMsmqConfiguration();
                sbc.UseMulticastSubscriptionClient();
                sbc.ReceiveFrom("msmq://localhost/test_queue_client");
                sbc.UseSubscriptionService("msmq://m3-dev1/mt_subscriptions"); // maybe I could use http instead of msmq, but it doesn't work
            });

Any clues on that??

Answer 1

No, MassTransit does not support HTTP for MSMQ. You could, in theory, add your own transport that supports that. RabbitMQ is a way better transport than MSMQ in every way except if you need to enroll in distributed transactions. And RabbitMQ only requires a single port open between the boxes.

Answer 2

Our approach for distributed integration is to have a custom web service contract with proper security. This defines an input port. The input port actually publishes messages to mass transit buses.

On the other side, the same contract is used to deliver messages to subscribers.

By having a custom contract and http/https transport we are independent on actual message bus in the middle. And this pays of, we were using another bus for like 2 years and 2 years ago we migrated to mass transit based bus without ANY changes to clients (publishers/subscribers).