Introduction
The Windows Azure Queue Service is the Windows Azure Storage Service feature that manages Windows Azure queues and the messages in them. A queue facilitates scalability of a Windows Azure hosted service by allowing disconnected communication between roles in the hosted service, allowing the roles to scale independently of each other. Indeed, they do not even need to be active at the same time.
More generally, the Queue service provides a coherent way to manage the processing of a task comprising several steps. For example, a long-lived task could be broken up into steps and the status of these steps managed using queues. We look at this in the Managing Windows Azure queues recipe.
The Queue service provides a two-level hierarchy comprising queues and the messages in them. The only limit on the size of a queue is the 100 TB limit for a storage service account. An individual message may store up to 8192 bytes of data. A queue stores a message for a maximum of seven days, after which...
