Category Archive News


GitHub stars

Rebus has reached 1000 stars on GitHub. 🤠

It may seem like an odd thing to notice, but I couldn’t help getting all warm and fuzzy inside! In my view, that silly little number, albeit primitive and one-dimensional, is a clear indication of a something pretty important: Street credibility among programmers.

Even though Rebus started out as a selfish project, in the sense that I needed a handy messaging library that didn’t have licensing obstacles in the way of delivering great software to consulting clients, it has grown to be so much more.

Many thanks to the almost 100 contributors besides me, who have contributed with their time and intellect to build Rebus and around 50 integration libraries.

Much ❤️.


Generic host

Over the years, people have often asked me if Rebus had a “generic host”, similar to NServiceBus’ Generic Host. In case you don’t know, NServiceBus’ generic host is a library that helps you easily get an NServiceBus endpoint up and running as a Windows Service.

Rebus doesn’t have a generic host though – and there’s a good reason for that! 🙂

The reason is, that there’s no reason why the Windows Service host should in any way be Rebus-specific!

What you really want in a Windows Service host (and in any host, really) is just a simple model for initializing something, keeping it around for the duration of the program’s lifetime, with proper termination at the end.

The cool thing is that .NET has great built-in mechanisms for initializing and terminating things – they’re called CONSTRUCTORS and IDisposable!

So what if a Windows Service could be composed of something, that should simply be newed up and disposed afterwards? And what if the hosting library made it possible to also run the app as an Azure Web Job? And what if it could host any number of “things”?

That’s what Topper does! 😎

Topper is built on Topshelf, so that means F5-debugging as a Console Application, and the ability to be installed as a Windows Service.

In addition to this, Topper will detect if it’s running as an Azure Web Job and do what’s necessary to shut down cleanly.

This is what your program can look like with Topper:

class Program
    static void Main()
        var configuration = new ServiceConfiguration()
            .Add("first", () => new MyFirstService())
            .Add("second", () => new MySecondService());


ServiceConfiguration allows for adding any number of named factories, each returning an IDisposable, and async factories (Func<Task<IDisposable>>) are supported, too.

As you can see, there’s no good reason why a “generic host” should be tied to any particular service bus library… so that’s why Rebus does not have a generic host. 🤓


MongoDB database migration







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Meet Afonso

Hi everyone, meet Afonso!

Having finished a secondary school professional programme within Computing, he came to Denmark two years ago from his home island of Madeira in Portugal, to pursue an AP degree in IT Technology at Dania Academy in Viborg. 🎓

Afonso has now moved to Horsens to do his final internship here at Rebus FM, where he will spend most of his time performing a security review of Fleet Manager. 🚌

In addition to this, it’s already quite clear that he will inspire Alley 87‘s residents to extend #skalerbar‘s assortment of beverages into the territory of fortified wines, which we’re looking forward to. 🍷


MongolianBarbecue is out as 1.0.0

It’s a nifty little tool with a silly label, but since it implements queues on top of MongoDB, the name was inevitable! 🤠

So, if all you have in the world is MongoDB, and you want to do some messaging, you can do this:

var config = new Config("mongodb://MONGOBONGO01/some-db", "messages");

to create a configuration, and then you

var producer = config.CreateProducer();
var message = new Message(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes("hei"));

await producer.SendAsync("destination-queue", message);

to send a UTF8-encoded text to a queue named destination-queue, and then you

var consumer = config.CreateConsumer("destination-queue");

var message = await consumer.GetNextAsync();

// ... handle message here

to receive the message and handle it.

You can read more about it on the GitHub page, and you can get the binaries from your favorite package repository.

Read More


Tababular 3 is out

Nothing happened, really, since announcing the beta, so this is just a little public service announcement to tell you that Tababular is out now as version 3! 🙂

“What’s tababambabular?”, you might ask?

It’s just a little nifty library that can format data as tables, which is a nice thing to do sometimes.

E.g. in automated tests, instead of outputting one manually formatted crappy-looking test output after another, why not just collect the data and print it as a table? Here’s an example from the Fleet Manager’s driver, where emitted saga snapshot states are presented in a nice, readable summary form:

| Revisions | SagaId                               |
| 0         | 42d9beb5-d94c-4f62-9c60-65beb40c9b5e |
| 1         |                                      |
| 2         |                                      |
| 3         |                                      |
| 0         | 1c4c3db0-9ac2-4541-9752-ed01719aa217 |
| 1         |                                      |
| 2         |                                      |
| 3         |                                      |
| 4         |                                      |
| 5         |                                      |
| 6         |                                      |
| 7         |                                      |

Or how about CLI applications? Check out how Fleet Manager’s administration CLI presents the list of accounts in our DEV environment:

Happy formatting! 📜


Rebus 5 is out

Lots of small changes, only a few of them breaking(*), nothing earth-shattering 🙂

The biggest change is probably that the test helpers (FakeBus, SagaFixture, etc.) were moved to a separate repository and its own NuGet package: Rebus.TestHelpers.

Another slightly bigger change is that Rebus now targets .NET 4.5, .NET 4.6, and .NET Standard 2.0. If anyone is missing the .NET Standard 1.3. support, please ✉️➡️[email protected] and let us know why 👻

Some of the smaller changes include a few performance improvements 💨, an extension point to customize how topic names are created out of .NET types, the ability to “fail fast” (i.e. skip retries) in various situations 💥, and a way to delay message processing when starting up the bus.

As usual, WIRE-COMPATIBILITY is 100% with all versions of Rebus from 2 and up, so you don’t need to go all-in to start upgrading your endpoints! 😇

See the full 5.0.0 changelog entry for more details on what was changed.

(*) In theory, all changes can be breaking… in this case, the version was bumped to 5 primarily because the IRoutingApi interface was extended with the Defer method signature, and because all of the testing helpers were moved.


Support for Microsoft Extensions Logging

If you’re running your Rebus stuff on .NET Core, and you’re using “Microsoft Extensions Logging” (that’s just not a bite-sized title for a logging library), you’re in luck: Rebus now has Rebus.Microsoft.Extensions.Logging, so you can

var loggerFactory = new LoggerFactory()

	.Logging(l => l.MicrosoftExtensionsLogging(loggerFactory))
	.Transport(t => t.Use(...))

and have Rebus log its stuff there, too.

The package is currently in alpha, but since there’s not much to it, we expect it to be pretty stable.

Happy logging! 🤠


Rebus’ Azure Service Bus transport now supports .NET Core



