Understand how MassTransit could be a real alternative when building distributed systems on the .NET Platform.
What is MassTransit?
MassTransit is a lightweight service bus for building distributed .NET applications. The main goal is to provide a consistent, .NET friendly abstraction over the message transport (RabbitMQ, Azure Service Bus, etc.). MassTransit is not a new project. They've been around since 2007 and were created as an alternative to NServiceBus. In early 2014, the framework was rewritten to support asynchronous programming as well as leveraged the power of messaging platform. The code was also rewritten, resulting in an entirely new, completely asynchronous, and highly optimized framework for message processing.Why MassTransit
Like NServiceBus, MassTransit helps decoupling your backend from your frontend (and in general, decoupling services), leveraging enterprise design patterns like CQRS and Eventual Consistency. Some of the features you will find in MassTransit are:- providing support for messages, sagas
- supporting different transports
- allows automated or custom retries on failures
- asynchronous requests/responses
- poison message handling
- exception management
- custom serialization
- message correlation
- routing
- scheduling
Customizations
MassTransit is also extremely customizable and as mentioned previously can run on different transports (RabbitMQ, Azure Service Bus, etc) providing enormous benefits as both are strong and stable platforms with different characteristics. It also supports the new .NET Standard on .NET Core and runs on multi-platforms.Sample Code
With that introduction, let's review some code. If you come from a NServiceBus background, you'll probably looking for three things:
- How to initialize the bus
- How to initialize the host (your backend, where your handlers run)
- How to initialize a client (where you send messages from).
Initializing the Bus
The below code shows how to initialize a simple MassTransit Bus:Initializing a Server (Host)
The below code shows how to initialize a simple MassTransit server:Initializing a Client
The below code shows how to initialize a simple MassTransit client that talks to the above service:Final Thoughts
This ends our quick introduction about MassTransit. I've been using NServiceBus for quite some time and while I recognize the value it adds, my frustrations with it grew significantly over time. For that reason I started looking for alternatives and found MassTransit a couple of years ago. I've been using MassTransit since them and I can confidently say that MassTransit is a solid alternative to NServiceBus not only due to its solid codebase but also for its community and growing ecosystem.
Want to learn more about MassTransit? Please consider reading the following posts:
- MassTransit, a real alternative to NServiceBus?
- Creating a MassTransit client/server application using RabbitMQ, .Net Core and Linux
- Exploring MassTransit InMemory Scheduled Messaging using RabbitMQ and .Net Core
In case you're interested, I recently pushed an updated MassTransit/Docker/.NET Core 3.1 implementation to GitHub at: github.com/hd9/masstransit-rabbitmq
References
See Also
- Adding Application Insights telemetry to your ASP.NET Core website
- Creating ASP.NET Core websites with Docker
- Send emails from ASP.NET Core websites using SendGrid and Azure
- Hosting NuGet packages on GitHub
- Configuration in .NET Core console applications
- Migrating NServiceBus backends to Azure WebJobs
- Custom Security on NserviceBus Endpoints
- Building and Running ASP.NET Core apps on Linux
- .NET Core and .NET merging as .NET 5.0
- Package Management in .NET Core