I’ve written quite extensively in the past about Azure, and Azure Storage. I recently needed to add a message to an Azure storage queue, and realised that I had never written a post about that, specifically. As with many Azure focused .Net activities, it’s not too complex; but I do like to have my own notes on things.

If you’ve arrived at this post, you may find it’s very similar to the Microsoft documentation.

How to add a message

The first step is to install a couple of NuGet packages:

Install-Package Microsoft.Azure.Storage.Common
Install-Package Microsoft.Azure.Storage.Queue

My preference for these kinds of things is to create a helper: largely so that I can mock it out for testing; however, even if you fundamentally object to the concept of testing, you may find such a class helpful, as it keeps all your code in one place.

 public class StorageQueueHelper
{
        private readonly string \_connectionString;
        private readonly string \_queueName;

        public StorageQueueHelper(string connectionString, string queueName)
        {
            \_connectionString = connectionString;
            \_queueName = queueName;
        }

        public async Task AddNewMessage(string messageBody)
        {
            var queue = await GetQueue();

            CloudQueueMessage message = new CloudQueueMessage(messageBody);
            await queue.AddMessageAsync(message);
        }

        private async Task<CloudQueue> GetQueue()
        {
            CloudStorageAccount storageAccount = CloudStorageAccount.Parse(\_connectionString);
            CloudQueueClient queueClient = storageAccount.CreateCloudQueueClient();
            CloudQueue queue = queueClient.GetQueueReference(\_queueName);
            await queue.CreateIfNotExistsAsync();

            return queue;
        }
}

The class above works for a single queue, and storage account. Depending on your use case, this might not be appropriate.

The GetQueue() method here is a bit naughty, as it actually changes something (or potentially changes something). Essentially, all it’s doing is connecting to a cloud storage account, and then getting a reference to a queue. We know that the queue will exist, because we’re forcing it to (CreateIfNotExistsAsync()).

Back in AddNewMessage(), once we have the queue, it’s trivial to simply create the message and add it.

References

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/queues/storage-tutorial-queues