How to read last message in MessageQueue - c#-4.0

Question

I am trying to read the messages in MessageQueue start from newest one. I know I can use GetAllMessages(). Then loop through. But it is quite slow when there are large amount of messages in the queue. Is there a better way to do this?
Thanks

Answer 1

In MSMQ 3 there is a feature that may be what you're looking for. The ReceiveByLookupId method can get the last message on the queue.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/3w50th9h.aspx
You would use the following action:
MessageLookupAction.Last: Receives the last message in the queue and
removes it from the queue. The lookupId parameter must be set to 0.
If you're using an earlier version of MSMQ you will probably have to use Peek similar to how this blog post explains how to get a count of the message queue. When you got to the last one, you could then ReceiveById.
http://jopinblog.wordpress.com/2008/03/12/counting-messages-in-an-msmq-messagequeue-from-c/

Answer 2

Assuming that the performance hit is in the looping through the messages:
There is no need to loop through all the messages if all you want is the last one. Since GetAllMessages() returns an array of type Message just go to the last element in the array by index.

Answer 3

public class PersonDetails
{
public string FirstName { get; set; }
public string LastName { get; set; }
public DateTime DateTime { get; set; }
}
const string queueName = #".\private$\PersonQueue";
public void GetMessageFromQueue(string queueName)
{
MessageQueue perosnMessageQueue = new MessageQueue(queueName);
try
{
XmlMessageFormatter xmlMessageFormatter = new XmlMessageFormatter(new Type[] {
(typeof(PersonDetails)) });
perosnMessageQueue.Formatter = xmlMessageFormatter;
perosnMessageQueue.Refresh();
for (int i = perosnMessageQueue.GetAllMessages().Count(); i !=0; i--)
{
var personDetailsFromQueue =
(PersonDetails)perosnMessageQueue.Receive
(MessageQueueTransactionType.Automatic).Body;
Console.WriteLine("FistName : {0} \n LastName : {1} \n Date Time :
{2}",personDetailsFromQueue.FirstName,
personDetailsFromQueue.LastName,
personDetailsFromQueue.DateTime);`
}