NServiceBus vs Windows ServiceBus

TimJohnson picture TimJohnson · Jul 17, 2012 · Viewed 13.8k times · Source

Would someone be able to shed some light on the differences between the newly release Windows ServiceBus (on premise, not Azure) and NServiceBus?

Looking for a detailed answer what the windows SB may be missing as I'm familiar what NSErviceBus can do:

  1. Is it a real service bus and not just a message broker that uses queues?
  2. Can it support message polymorphism? (Messages subclassing other messages and handlers supporting this hierarchy
  3. Long running processes and correlation
  4. Scale out

Answer

Yves Goeleven picture Yves Goeleven · Jul 19, 2012

I'm responsible for the Windows Azure ServiceBus support in NServicebus. And in my opinion this new Windows Server Servicebus provides the exact same capabilities as the Azure ServiceBus. So in my opinion it will be a good match with NServiceBus instead of a competitor (just as the Windows Azure ServiceBus is) and could be used instead of msmq.

To answer your questions

  1. The new servicebus is a broker that uses queues
  2. Messages on the servicebus are just strings in the end, the servicebus itself has no additional support for message types, hierarchies, handlers etc. Typically you would use WCF or NServiceBus for this.
  3. There is no support for long running processes nor correlation. It does have some feature overlap with NServiceBus though as it can do subcriptions/topics, it can also do deferral of messages as well as filters.
  4. It's designed to scale out.

Hope this helps?

Kind regards, Yves