Queue usage

This section focuses on the queuing facility of the storage service. As described previously in this chapter, queues provide a reliable delivery of messages.

A closer look at the queue

In the following table, the characteristics of Windows Azure queues are listed:

Characteristic	Description
Names must be lower case	Using uppercase or lowercase characters do not affect operations on queues, though the case is preserved by the storage service.
Names are at least three and at most 63 characters long
Names can only contain alphanumeric characters
No ordering guarantee; based on best-effort FIFO	It is nondeterministic whether or not the messages are sorted in a FIFO order.
Delivered at least once	A message is delivered at least once. This implicitly means that it can happen that the same message appears on the queue more than once. To handle this phenomenon, your message processing needs to be idempotent (We'll see this later in this chapter).
Locking and leasing	Default...