Send messages to an Azure Service Bus topic and receive messages from subscriptions to the topic (.NET)

This tutorial shows you how to create a .NET Core console app that sends messages to a Service Bus topic and receives messages from a subscription of the topic.

Important

This quickstart uses the new Azure.Messaging.ServiceBus package. For a quickstart that uses the old Microsoft.Azure.ServiceBus package, see Send and receive messages using the Microsoft.Azure.ServiceBus package.

Prerequisites

Send messages to a topic

In this section, you'll create a .NET Core console application in Visual Studio, add code to send messages to the topic you created.

Create a console application

Launch Visual Studio and create a new Console App (.NET Core) project for C#.

Add the Service Bus NuGet package

  1. Right-click the newly created project and select Manage NuGet Packages.
  2. Select Browse. Search for and select Azure.Messaging.ServiceBus.
  3. Select Install to complete the installation, then close the NuGet Package Manager.

Add code to send messages to the topic

  1. In Program.cs, add the following using statements at the top of the namespace definition, before the class declaration:

    using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using Azure.Messaging.ServiceBus;

  2. In the Program class, declare the following variables:

        static string connectionString = "<NAMESPACE CONNECTION STRING>";
    static string topicName = "<TOPIC NAME>";
    static string subscriptionName = "<SUBSCRIPTION NAME>";

    Replace the following values:

    • <NAMESPACE CONNECTION STRING> with the connection string to your Service Bus namespace
    • <TOPIC NAME> with the name of the topic
    • <SUBSCRIPTION NAME> with the name of the subscription

  3. Add a method named SendMessageToTopicAsync that sends one message to the topic.

        static async Task SendMessageToTopicAsync()
    {
        // create a Service Bus client 
        await using (ServiceBusClient client = new ServiceBusClient(connectionString))
        {
            // create a sender for the topic
            ServiceBusSender sender = client.CreateSender(topicName);
            await sender.SendMessageAsync(new ServiceBusMessage("Hello, World!"));
            Console.WriteLine($"Sent a single message to the topic: {topicName}");
        }
    }

  4. Add a method named CreateMessages to create a queue (.NET queue) of messages to the Program class. Typically, you get these messages from different parts of your application. Here, we create a queue of sample messages.

        static Queue<ServiceBusMessage> CreateMessages()
    {
        // create a queue containing the messages and return it to the caller
        Queue<ServiceBusMessage> messages = new Queue<ServiceBusMessage>();
        messages.Enqueue(new ServiceBusMessage("First message"));
        messages.Enqueue(new ServiceBusMessage("Second message"));
        messages.Enqueue(new ServiceBusMessage("Third message"));
        return messages;
    }

  5. Add a method named SendMessageBatchAsync to the Program class, and add the following code. This method takes a queue of messages, and prepares one or more batches to send to the Service Bus topic.

        static async Task SendMessageBatchToTopicAsync()
    {
        // create a Service Bus client 
        await using (ServiceBusClient client = new ServiceBusClient(connectionString))
        {

            // create a sender for the topic 
            ServiceBusSender sender = client.CreateSender(topicName);

            // get the messages to be sent to the Service Bus topic
            Queue<ServiceBusMessage> messages = CreateMessages();

            // total number of messages to be sent to the Service Bus topic
            int messageCount = messages.Count;

            // while all messages are not sent to the Service Bus topic
            while (messages.Count > 0)
            {
                // start a new batch 
                using ServiceBusMessageBatch messageBatch = await sender.CreateMessageBatchAsync();

                // add the first message to the batch
                if (messageBatch.TryAddMessage(messages.Peek()))
                {
                    // dequeue the message from the .NET queue once the message is added to the batch
                    messages.Dequeue();
                }
                else
                {
                    // if the first message can't fit, then it is too large for the batch
                    throw new Exception($"Message {messageCount - messages.Count} is too large and cannot be sent.");
                }

                // add as many messages as possible to the current batch
                while (messages.Count > 0 && messageBatch.TryAddMessage(messages.Peek()))
                {
                    // dequeue the message from the .NET queue as it has been added to the batch
                    messages.Dequeue();
                }

                // now, send the batch
                await sender.SendMessagesAsync(messageBatch);

                // if there are any remaining messages in the .NET queue, the while loop repeats 
            }

            Console.WriteLine($"Sent a batch of {messageCount} messages to the topic: {topicName}");
        }
    }

  6. Replace the Main() method with the following async Main method. It calls both the send methods to send a single message and a batch of messages to the topic.

        static async Task Main()
    {
        // send a message to the topic
        await SendMessageToTopicAsync();

        // send a batch of messages to the topic
        await SendMessageBatchToTopicAsync();
    }

  7. Run the application. You should see the following output:

    Sent a single message to the topic: mytopic
Sent a batch of 3 messages to the topic: mytopic

  8. In the Azure portal, follow these steps:

    1. Navigate to your Service Bus namespace.

    2. On the Overview page, in the bottom-middle pane, switch to the Topics tab, and select the Service Bus topic. In the following example, it's mytopic.

      Select topic

    3. On the Service Bus Topic page, In the Messages chart in the bottom Metrics section, you can see that there are four incoming messages for the topic. If you don't see the value, wait for a few minutes and refresh the page to see the updated chart.

      Messages sent to the topic

    4. Select the subscription in the bottom pane. In the following example, it's S1. On the Service Bus Subscription page, you see the Active message count as 4. The subscription has received the four messages that you sent to the topic, but no receiver has picked them yet.

      Messages received at the subscription

Receive messages from a subscription

  1. Add the following methods to the Program class that handle messages and any errors.

        static async Task MessageHandler(ProcessMessageEventArgs args)
    {
        string body = args.Message.Body.ToString();
        Console.WriteLine($"Received: {body} from subscription: {subscriptionName}");

        // complete the message. messages is deleted from the queue. 
        await args.CompleteMessageAsync(args.Message);
    }

    static Task ErrorHandler(ProcessErrorEventArgs args)
    {
        Console.WriteLine(args.Exception.ToString());
        return Task.CompletedTask;
    }

  2. Add the following method ReceiveMessagesFromSubscriptionAsync to the Program class.

        static async Task ReceiveMessagesFromSubscriptionAsync()
    {
        await using (ServiceBusClient client = new ServiceBusClient(connectionString))
        {
            // create a processor that we can use to process the messages
            ServiceBusProcessor processor = client.CreateProcessor(topicName, subscriptionName, new ServiceBusProcessorOptions());

            // add handler to process messages
            processor.ProcessMessageAsync += MessageHandler;

            // add handler to process any errors
            processor.ProcessErrorAsync += ErrorHandler;

            // start processing 
            await processor.StartProcessingAsync();

            Console.WriteLine("Wait for a minute and then press any key to end the processing");
            Console.ReadKey();

            // stop processing 
            Console.WriteLine("\nStopping the receiver...");
            await processor.StopProcessingAsync();
            Console.WriteLine("Stopped receiving messages");
        }
    }

  3. Add a call to the ReceiveMessagesFromSubscriptionAsync method to the Main method. Comment out the SendMessagesToTopicAsync method if you want to test only receiving of messages. If you don't, you see another four messages sent to the topic.

        static async Task Main()
    {
        // send a message to the topic
        await SendMessageToTopicAsync();

        // send a batch of messages to the topic
        await SendMessageBatchToTopicAsync();

        // receive messages from the subscription
        await ReceiveMessagesFromSubscriptionAsync();
    }

Run the app

Run the application. Wait for a minute and then press any key to stop receiving messages. You should see the following output (spacebar for the key).

Sent a single message to the topic: mytopic
Sent a batch of 3 messages to the topic: mytopic
Wait for a minute and then press any key to end the processing
Received: Hello, World! from subscription: mysub
Received: First message from subscription: mysub
Received: Second message from subscription: mysub
Received: Third message from subscription: mysub
Received: Hello, World! from subscription: mysub
Received: First message from subscription: mysub
Received: Second message from subscription: mysub
Received: Third message from subscription: mysub

Stopping the receiver...
Stopped receiving messages

Check the portal again.

  • On the Service Bus Topic page, in the Messages chart, you see eight incoming messages and eight outgoing messages. If you don't see these numbers, wait for a few minutes, and refresh the page to see the updated chart.

    Messages sent and received

  • On the Service Bus Subscription page, you see the Active message count as zero. It's because a receiver has received messages from this subscription and completed the messages.

    Active message count at the subscription at the end

Next steps

See the following documentation and samples: