If I ask Bob to get me a sandwich and Bob says "Ok," but then he is hit by a bus on his way back from the shop, I will never get my sandwich--and I don't know I'm not going to get my sandwich!--so I don't tell anyone else, "hey, I'm hungry!"
Is there a way to deal with this problem in MSMQ? Can I reserve a message so that it won't be passed to anyone else but not consume it so that I can put it back in the queue later if I choke on it?
I don't even know what you'd call that. :|
Clarification: I'm using a transactional queue. But if the consumer receives a message (and the message is removed), what happens when that consumer then fails to do what the message is asking it to do? Is the only option to have the consumer put it back on the queue?
Ok, so I finally found an answer: you can use transactions on the Receive() call just as you can on the Send() call. You can then abort the transaction and it will be rolled back, leaving the message in the queue (provided, of course, that you use a transactional queue).
I actually found this answer on StackOverflow (MSMQ receive with transaction - rollback not making message available again), but the question asked there was entirely different, so it wasn't all that easy to locate.
I'm leaving this question up just in case the semantics more closely match someone else's Google search.