How to get up and running with Rebus

Now that Rebus is present on NuGet, it has become extremely easy to get started. This small guide will show how to build a simple TopShelf service, that will send a message to itself. It should be pretty easy to extend this to a more complete example with multiple services, but let’s just keep it really simple for now.

Create the host process

First, we create a TopShelf host process that has all the necessary stuff to be able to run and be debugged, as well as installed, uninstalled, and be managed as a Windows Service. Precious stuff when you’re building backend processes.

Create a Console Application

Do what the header says – and change the target framework from that bastard “.NET 4 Framework Client Profile” to “.NET 4 Framework”.

Go get TopShelf

Open a package manager console (we’ll need it for the Rebus alpha packages), and

For some reason, you need to download Log4Net manually, even though TopShelf depends on it.

Configure Log4Net and declare the TopShelf service

Now, do something like this in your Program.cs:

and then add some XML to your app.config:

Now you should be able to run the service and see a buttload of log statements, courtesy of TopShelf.

Insert Rebus

Now that we have the host process up and running, let’s make the program do stuff.

Let’s get Rebus

Go to the package manager console again, and do this:

Let’s configure and use it!

Now, you should be able to implement your Start and Stop methods like this:

Now, in order to make the container.Register(...) line from above compile, you need to let Program implement IHandleMessages<string>. Try adding something like this:

If you run the program now, you’ll get some kind of error, saying that the input queue name is invalid. That’s because we haven’t configured Rebus yet. Let’s do that by modifying app.config by adding this:

The InputQueue attribute above tells Rebus to receive messages from the RebusTest.input queue, and the <add ...> elements says to send messages of the System.String type to the same RebusTest.input queue.

Let’s run it

Now you should be able to run it and see something like this on your screen:

If you get the same w00t!!!: HELLLLLO WORLD!!!1 in your console, it means you’re ready to start building stuff with Rebus 🙂

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