Last year at PDC 2010, the Azure AppFabric team made a number of important announcements. One of the improvements they released was a significantly enhanced version of the Azure AppFabric Service Bus Message Buffers feature.
What’s the difference between the current Message Buffers and the new Durable Message Buffers?
The current version of Message Buffers provide a small in-memory store inside the Azure Service Bus where up to 50 messages no larger than 64KB can be stored for up to ten minutes. Each message can be retrieved by a single receiver. This makes the range of scenario’s where this is useful somewhat limited. The new version of Message Buffers enhance this feature so it could have a much wider appeal. Message Buffers are now durable and look much more like a queuing system. This makes it possible to start using Durable Message Buffers as an alternative to the Azure Queues.