Thursday, July 11th, 2013.

It’s here!

NServiceBus version 4.0 is now out.

Hard to believe it’s been more than 7 years since I started on this journey.

I know I always say this, but this is our biggest release ever. It’s been over a year since we released version 3.0 and in that time, the adoption of NServiceBus has totally exploded. I know I always talk about the big brand names but there have been hundreds of small to medium companies that have been seeing real success on this platform.

OK – one big name. I feel like I have to. If you’ve been to McDonald’s and purchased a happy meal for your kids – that’s going through NServiceBus. Yeah, at any McDonald’s around the world – and not just happy meals.

What’s in the box

While NServiceBus has historically used MSMQ as its primary queuing infrastructure, we now support RabbitMQ and ActiveMQ out of the box so you have full AMQP compliance at the wire level, and we’re soon going to be releasing a fully supported IBM MQ transport.

You can see the complete release notes for version 4 of NServiceBus here.

For those organizations who’ve been ignoring NServiceBus until now because they prefer having everything in a central database, we now support using database tables as queues.

While I’ve always been big on queuing infrastructure, I understand that it takes time for an organization to change and I hope that this will provide a smooth transition path.

Try it online now

If you’re in a locked-down corporate environment that won’t let you install anything on your box, but you’d still like to try NServiceBus out, we’ve got the solution for you.

Try our new hands-on labs – you’ll get remote access to a machine in the cloud with NServiceBus pre-installed on it ready to go.

We’ve even got a scale-out lab where you’ll see just how easy it is to build a 4 machine NServiceBus solution.

Try the labs.

Modeling

I’ve talked before about some modeling tools we’ve been working on for NServiceBus and I’m happy to say that they’re now ready for public beta. Instead of the name NServiceBus Studio (which overlapped far too much with Visual Studio), we’re now calling this ServiceMatrix.

ServiceMatrix makes building message-driven service-oriented solutions an absolute joy allowing you to operate at much higher levels of abstraction. Find out more here.

Debugging

While the looser-coupling of message-driven systems makes them more scalable and maintainable, it does make debugging harder since you can’t just step-through one function to another when everything is invoked asynchronously.

For that reason, we’ve been working on visualization and management tooling to make things easier. By leveraging the built-in auditing of NServiceBus, we can show you the message causation chain – which command caused which event, which in turn caused what other messages to flow. We also hook into the error queue to show you when messages fail (in orange below) and the full stack trace of the exception.

Of course, you can always see the full body and headers of each message.

This tool, called ServiceInsight is now in its second beta and the feedback has been overwhelming – “oh my God, how could you have waited this long to release this?! Even our testers and admins are using it.”.

In Particular

You might have noticed that all of these links are going to the Particular.net domain, and that the existing NServiceBus.com now redirects there as well.

After talking things over internally, the team agreed that we wanted to be much more than “just” a service bus. The new products I mentioned above are the first step in that direction, but there is more to come.

We wanted a name that wouldn’t pigeon-hole us but, I’ve got to tell you, it’s extremely hard to find a name for a software company (and a corresponding domain) that isn’t already taken.

When we hit on the name Particular Software and saw that ParticularSoftware.com was open, we were quite thrilled. You see, we’re very particular about the software we use, and we want to write software for people who are just as discerning as us. Getting Particular.net was nice too.

In closing

I want to take this opportunity to thank our community for believing in us all this time, and an especially big thank you to our community champions who have been gently shepherding thousands of new users in their first NServiceBus steps.

To our partners that have been building solutions for their customers on NServiceBus – you have our deepest appreciation. We’ve also got some new things coming just for you that you’ll really like.

By the way, if you’re an independent consultant or working at a consulting company and would like partner with us, please reach out to us.

And, although we’re constantly growing the team – it seems like there’s always so much more to be done. When I started down this path over 7 years ago, I never imagined that this could go on this long. Today, I’m pretty sure that there’s at least another 7 years more to go.

We’re dedicated to making this the best service platform out there.

Check it out.