NServiceBus 3.0 Details

The following content is paraphrased from the Yahoo Group:

First of all, I'd like to talk about the thing that will influence you the most. We're making every effort to make the use of NServiceBus (particularly it's auxiliary processes like the Timeout Manager, Distributor, and Gateway) much, much easier. What this means is removing much of complexity of using these capabilities by hosting them within the same host as your own process, but don't worry, we'll make it easy for you to turn them on and off using profiles. This will enable us to configure all the routing to these processes for you, but if you want, you can always go back to the manual approach in version 2.x. This is where I'll be investing most of my time.

 Second, there's the Data Bus feature that Andreas Öhlund (http://andreasohlund.net/) has been working on. As many of you know, most queuing transports have a limit on the size of message they can deliver - with MSMQ this is 4MB, with Azure it's 8KB. The Data Bus will allow you to transmit messages of an almost arbitrary size as it transmits the "data" portion on a separate infrastructure than the actual message. This is currently implemented using the file system but will be done using a database (RavenDB) as well - more on that in just a minute. The thing is that between remote sites, there often isn't the ability to have a shared file system or database, as the sites may not always be connected to each other. In order to resolve this issue, Andreas is also working on the Gateway to make it Data Bus aware - that and also able to support transports other than HTTP, like TCP and FTP.

 Third, there's the Azure integration that Yves Goeleven has been driving for some time now. For all those of you who've been looking for a simpler developer experience on Azure, Yves has really done it, abstracting away almost all of the underlying complexity behind your standard NServiceBus interfaces. You can find out more about this through his series of blog posts here:http://cloudshaper.wordpress.com/

Fourth is RavenDB integration. I'm happy to say that a licensing agreement has been reached that will allow users of NServiceBus Standard Edition to use RavenDB for things like Subscription Storage and Saga Persistence at no additional cost. This will save you from having to haggle with your DBAs anytime you want production-ready storage for NServiceBus - it'll give you a much more cohesive deployment without worrying about overloading your existing relational databases. I'm happy to welcome one of our newest committers, Jonathan Matheus (http://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanmatheus), who is making this happen.

 The integration of RavenDB will enable us to stop merging NHibernate, but we'll still integrate with it out of the box. This will make it much easier for you to plug in your own version of NH instead of ours.

 Fifth is the Timeout Manager - one of the areas of NServiceBus that hasn't been as strong as the others. Jonathan Oliver (http://blog.jonathanoliver.com/ who has been ramping up his involvement over the past while) will be using our new RavenDB persistence to replace the use the input queue, which will dramatically increase the performance and robustness of the Timeout Manager.

We're also looking at stronger Visual Studio integration, possibly to the level of providing model-driven code/config generation. We'll see if it's feasible to get that done within the 3.0 timeframe, or whether that will be delivered as a separate download afterwards.

 Finally, the 3.0 release schedule looks something like this - Alpha by the end of April (primarily focusing on APIs), Beta in July, and a Release (or at least release candidate you can go live with) in September.