Does NServiceBus, at any point, for any reason, have to post empty messages to MSMQ, and if so, why and when does it happen? Longer explanation below.
A project I work on makes use of NServiceBus version 4. That version does not allow "multi-hosting" of event handlers for different queues in a single process, which may be inconvenient if your project contains 40 or so different queues.
To overcome this problem in development, I made a small "router" app, which listens to all the necessary MSMQ queues and simply forwards all messages from them into a single "unified" queue. That "unified" queue is specified as the queue name for the "unified endpoint" process, which references all the handlers for all the messages that would normally be handled from those various queues.
The setup kind-of works, it seems (with most handlers, at least), but there is one mysterious behaviour (which, I presume, may have something to do with the set-up not working with some other handlers). Namely, as soon as the project starts up, my "router" immediately discovers a number of empty MSMQ messages posted to the queues it has to listen to. Apparently, NSB is publishing those messages during start-up for some reason (and most probably the router is snitching them up before NSB has the chance to look at them again).
I am sure this is not an artefact of my implementation as this does not happen unless NSB is also started. I am curious about the reasons.
NServiceBus, by default, autosubscribes to all handled events if it knows the endpoint which publishes them. These empty messages you see might be the subscribe messages because they are being sent during the endpoint start-up phase.
The mechanics behind the subscribe messages are documented here. TL;DR for transports that do not provide publishing natively (e.g. MSMQ, Azure Storage Queues) NServiceBus emulates it using subscribe messages and internal subscription lists (storages).
You can verify this by checking the message intent header. If they are not subscribe messages, please share the complete list of headers of such a message for further investigation.