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Getting started with Azure Queue storage and Visual Studio connected services (cloud services projects)

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Overview

Important

Cloud Services (classic) is now deprecated for new customers and will be retired on August 31st, 2024 for all customers. New deployments should use the new Azure Resource Manager based deployment model Azure Cloud Services (extended support).

This article describes how to get started using Azure Queue storage in Visual Studio after you have created or referenced an Azure storage account in a cloud services project by using the Visual Studio Add Connected Services dialog.

We'll show you how to create a queue in code. We'll also show you how to perform basic queue operations, such as adding, modifying, reading and removing queue messages. The samples are written in C# code and use the Microsoft Azure Storage Client Library for .NET.

The Add Connected Services operation installs the appropriate NuGet packages to access Azure storage in your project and adds the connection string for the storage account to your project configuration files.

Azure Queue storage is a service for storing large numbers of messages that can be accessed from anywhere in the world via authenticated calls using HTTP or HTTPS. A single queue message can be up to 64 KB in size, and a queue can contain millions of messages, up to the total capacity limit of a storage account.

Access queues in code

To access queues in Visual Studio Cloud Services projects, you need to include the following items to any C# source file that access Azure Queue storage.

  1. Make sure the namespace declarations at the top of the C# file include these using statements.

    using Microsoft.Framework.Configuration;
using Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Storage;
using Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Storage.Queue;

  2. Get a CloudStorageAccount object that represents your storage account information. Use the following code to get the your storage connection string and storage account information from the Azure service configuration.

    CloudStorageAccount storageAccount = CloudStorageAccount.Parse(
CloudConfigurationManager.GetSetting("<storage-account-name>_AzureStorageConnectionString"));

  3. Get a CloudQueueClient object to reference the queue objects in your storage account.

    // Create the queue client.
CloudQueueClient queueClient = storageAccount.CreateCloudQueueClient();

  4. Get a CloudQueue object to reference a specific queue.

    // Get a reference to a queue named "messageQueue"
CloudQueue messageQueue = queueClient.GetQueueReference("messageQueue");

NOTE: Use all of the above code in front of the code in the following samples.

Create a queue in code

To create the queue in code, just add a call to CreateIfNotExists.

// Create the CloudQueue if it does not exist
messageQueue.CreateIfNotExists();

Add a message to a queue

To insert a message into an existing queue, create a new CloudQueueMessage object, then call the AddMessage method.

A CloudQueueMessage object can be created from either a string (in UTF-8 format) or a byte array.

Here is an example which inserts the message 'Hello, World'.

// Create a message and add it to the queue.
CloudQueueMessage message = new CloudQueueMessage("Hello, World");
messageQueue.AddMessage(message);

Read a message in a queue

You can peek at the message in the front of a queue without removing it from the queue by calling the PeekMessage method.

// Peek at the next message
CloudQueueMessage peekedMessage = messageQueue.PeekMessage();

Read and remove a message in a queue

Your code can remove (de-queue) a message from a queue in two steps.

  1. Call GetMessage to get the next message in a queue. A message returned from GetMessage becomes invisible to any other code reading messages from this queue. By default, this message stays invisible for 30 seconds.
  2. To finish removing the message from the queue, call DeleteMessage.

This two-step process of removing a message assures that if your code fails to process a message due to hardware or software failure, another instance of your code can get the same message and try again. The following code calls DeleteMessage right after the message has been processed.

// Get the next message in the queue.
CloudQueueMessage retrievedMessage = messageQueue.GetMessage();

// Process the message in less than 30 seconds

// Then delete the message.
await messageQueue.DeleteMessage(retrievedMessage);

Use additional options to process and remove queue messages

There are two ways you can customize message retrieval from a queue.

  • You can get a batch of messages (up to 32).
  • You can set a longer or shorter invisibility timeout, allowing your code more or less time to fully process each message. The following code example uses the GetMessages method to get 20 messages in one call. Then it processes each message using a foreach loop. It also sets the invisibility timeout to five minutes for each message. Note that the 5 minutes starts for all messages at the same time, so after 5 minutes have passed since the call to GetMessages, any messages which have not been deleted will become visible again.

Here's an example:

foreach (CloudQueueMessage message in messageQueue.GetMessages(20, TimeSpan.FromMinutes(5)))
{
    // Process all messages in less than 5 minutes, deleting each message after processing.

    // Then delete the message after processing
    messageQueue.DeleteMessage(message);

}

Get the queue length

You can get an estimate of the number of messages in a queue. The FetchAttributes method asks the Queue service to retrieve the queue attributes, including the message count. The ApproximateMethodCount property returns the last value retrieved by the FetchAttributes method, without calling the Queue service.

// Fetch the queue attributes.
messageQueue.FetchAttributes();

// Retrieve the cached approximate message count.
int? cachedMessageCount = messageQueue.ApproximateMessageCount;

// Display number of messages.
Console.WriteLine("Number of messages in queue: " + cachedMessageCount);

Use the Async-Await Pattern with common Azure Queue APIs

This example shows how to use the Async-Await pattern with common Azure Queue APIs. The sample calls the async version of each of the given methods, this can be seen by the Async post-fix of each method. When an async method is used the async-await pattern suspends local execution until the call completes. This behavior allows the current thread to do other work which helps avoid performance bottlenecks and improves the overall responsiveness of your application. For more details on using the Async-Await pattern in .NET see Async and Await (C# and Visual Basic)

// Create a message to put in the queue
CloudQueueMessage cloudQueueMessage = new CloudQueueMessage("My message");

// Add the message asynchronously
await messageQueue.AddMessageAsync(cloudQueueMessage);
Console.WriteLine("Message added");

// Async dequeue the message
CloudQueueMessage retrievedMessage = await messageQueue.GetMessageAsync();
Console.WriteLine("Retrieved message with content '{0}'", retrievedMessage.AsString);

// Delete the message asynchronously
await messageQueue.DeleteMessageAsync(retrievedMessage);
Console.WriteLine("Deleted message");

Delete a queue

To delete a queue and all the messages contained in it, call the Delete method on the queue object.

// Delete the queue.
messageQueue.Delete();

Next steps

Now that you've learned the basics of Azure queue storage, follow these links to learn about more complex storage tasks.