Use the NuGet package aqua.lib

Install-Package aqua.lib

or for pre-releases

Install-Package aqua.lib -Pre

aqua is a lightweight helper library to interact with Queues in Azure Storage Accounts in a produce/consumer like scenario where the messages in the queue define jobs to execute. aqua is made available as a NuGet package with strong named assemblies for your convenience.

Currently, jobs are specified in JSON similar to the below.

{ "Job": "HelloWho", "Properties": { "Who": "World" } }

You can use the Producer to create and enqueue job requests, or you can craft them manually. Jobs can be queued on demand, and you can even use Azure Scheduler Jobs to queue job requests periodically. A message with the above content can be interpreted to instruct a worker (using aqua) to execute the HelloWho job with the parameter Who set to World.

That is, if there is a registered job type such as the following:

public sealed class HelloWho : JobBase
{
    public string Who { get; set; }

    public bool Execute()
    {
        Console.WriteLine("Hello, {0}!", Who);

        return true;
    }
}

aqua helps in binding the job descriptor from the message to a new instance of the HelloWho class and executing it.

Through a few basic configuration settings, aqua can be configured to either discard messages that are not understood or that describe unknown jobs, or to requeue them, if desired only up to a certain threshold of times. The former can be useful for queues which are used solely by aqua-based consumers, while the latter may be useful if the same queue is used by a multitude of different consumers which know how to handle subsets of the messages stored in that queue. Requeueing can be done with a visibility timeout to enable basic retry scenarios with wait times.

In addition, aqua can be configured to reuse existing CloudStorageAccount objects when connecting to Azure, or to create new ones based on connection strings or account names and keys. Of course it also allows to connect to the local Azure Storage Emulator for local testing and debugging.

When using the aqua Consumer to consume (and handle) jobs from the queue, you can also specify, through retry strategies, the behavior to apply when the queue is currently empty. The following retry strategies come with the aqua library:

• No retry -- i.e. try once and then stop.
• Simple Retry -- i.e. try N times with a static wait time between tries.
• Linear Back-Off -- i.e. try N times with linear increasing wait times based on a configurable base wait time.
• Exponential Back-Off -- i.e. try N times with exponentially increasing wait times based on a configurable base wait time.
• Add Jitter -- i.e. a strategy which adds jitter to the wait times of any other strategy (e.g. the exponential back-off) to introduce some variation for competing consumers.
• Virtual Infinite Repeater -- i.e. repeat the last wait time from another strategy virtually forver.

In addition, you can of course also implement your own custom strategies tailored to your needs.

• v1.0.7
  • Migrate to netstandard 2.0.
  • Update Newtonsoft.Json and WindowsAzure.Storage NuGet dependencies.
  • Fix typo in DedicePerJob enum value, make it DecidePerJob.
• v1.0.6.0
  • Fix a bug in the Consumer's handling of binary messages which cannot be converted to string -- treat them as bad messages and apply the configured behavior.
• v1.0.5.0
  • Fix a bug in the InfiniteRepeaterRetryStrategy which would end up using an intermediate wait time if hopping between attempts.
  • Remove the DequeueCount property from queue messages created with the Producer.
  • Catch exceptions when binding jobs to a descriptor throws, e.g. due to deserialization exceptions, and treat the underlying message as bad messages.
• v1.0.4.0
  • Track job execution statistics such as average duration of succeeded and failed jobs per known job type.
  • Add requeue behaviors for bad messages and unknown jobs up a certain threshold, then delete messages.
  • Add consumer settings to configure the behavior for failed jobs too, offering the same options as for bad messages and unknown jobs.
  • Allow to specify a requeue visibility timeout for bad messages and unknown jobs, as well as failed jobs.
• v1.0.3.0
  • Fix a bug in the InfiniteRepeaterRetryStrategy which would always return 00:00:00 as the wait time if asked right away for the wait time of an attempt not supported by the inner strategy. I.e. if an inner strategy was used to return a wait time of 00:00:10 with their last try #5, and the InfiniteRepeaterRetryStrategy was asked right away for the wait time of try #6 (instead of asking for 1-5 first), 00:00:00 was returned.
  • Removed some leftover (unused) Console.WriteLine calls.
• v1.0.2.0
  • Fix Consumer.One to respect the return value from Job execution.
  • Update Producer.One with overloads that take a parameter initialVisibilityDelay which can be used to make a message visible only after some time. This can be very useful for job retry scenarios where handling a job should only be retried after some time.
• v1.0.1.0
  • Update Consumer to support cancelling while waiting for a message, using a CancellationToken.
  • Add the InifiniteRepeaterRetryStrategy which can be used to wait (based on another strategy) virtually forever.

... for more information and samples of how to use aqua.