MSMQ multiple readers

Question

This is my proposed architecture. Process A would create items and add it to a queue A on the local machine and I plan to have multiple instances of windows service( running on different machines) reading from this queue A .Each of these windows service would read a set of messages and then process that batch.

What I want to make sure is that a particular message will not get processed multiple times ( by the different windows service). Does MSMQ by default guarantee single delivery? Should I make the queue transactional? or would a regular queue suffice.

Answer 1

If you need to make sure that the message is delivered only once, you would want to use a transactional queue. However, when a service reads a message from the queue it is removed from the queue and can only be received once.