Topic: Pub/Sub Messaging with NServiceBus

When many people hear the term "service bus" they picture a central box which all communication goes through, like BizTalk. That's actually a description of the Broker architectural style, not the Bus architectural style. A bus isn't necessarily a physical entity. In that respect, NServiceBus is more similar to WCF than it is to BizTalk.

There is no physical WCF one can point to in the network topology. WCF is part of the infrastructure that is run in-process with a given application's code. NServiceBus is the same.

Just like you can write your own host process and activate WCF explicitly within it, you can do the same thing with NServiceBus. The bus in NServiceBus is something virtual - the collection of framework objects running in the various applicative processes. You can think of it as a kind of peer-to-peer mesh that runs alongside your code.

This month we're happy to have long-time group member Bernard Kowalski, a Software Engineer with Microdesk's Software Development Group lead a discussion of the NServiceBus technology and its application to building scalable messaging systems in .NET.

This meeting will be held at the Microsoft offices as usual. Check the Meetup site for details!