Author: Paolo Salvatori (@babosbird)
Collaborators: Sean Feldman (@sfeldman) and Erik Mogensen (@koltrast)
Contributors: Many

Service Bus Explorer

The Service Bus Explorer allows users to efficiently administer messaging entities. The tool provides advanced features like import/export functionality and the ability to test topic, queues, subscriptions, relay services, notification hubs and events hubs.

Software requirements

The following software is required to run ServiceBusExplorer. It may run on other versions.

• Windows 10 or later
• .NET Framework 4.6.2

Installation

It is strongly recommended to set Configuration File for Settings and Connection Strings to User Configuration File as shown in the figure below to reduce problems when upgrading.

Note: The ServiceBusExplorer.exe.config in the application directory will get overwritten during the upgrade.

If you have made changes to it, you should back it up before upgrading. If you follow the recommendation above then only advanced changes such as WCF configuration modifications cause this.

Do not overwite the new configuration file with the old file since the runtime section in the new must file not be modified.

Using Chocolatey

Installing for the first time

choco install ServiceBusExplorer

Upgrading

choco upgrade ServiceBusExplorer

The default location of the executable is C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\lib\ServiceBusExplorer\tools\ServiceBusExplorer.exe.

More information on our Chocolatey page.

Using Scoop

_Warning The scoop package is not maintained by the ServiceBusExplorer project so carefully check the package and the URLs it uses before using it. Also, the current package keeps the old version of ServiceBusExplorer.exe.config. That may cause assembly loading issues so do not use it for upgrading.

scoop install extras/servicebusexplorer

The default location of the executable is %USERPROFILE%\scoop\apps\servicebusexplorer\current\tools\ServiceBusExplorer.exe.

Using GitHub

curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/paolosalvatori/ServiceBusExplorer/releases/latest | grep browser_download_url | cut -d '"' -f 4

Contributions

There are no dedicated developers so development is entirely based on voluntary effort.

Here are some guidelines concerning contributions:

• All contributions should be done on main.
• Every pull request is built by GitHub Actions and should preferably be linked to a GitHub issue.
• Write unit tests, if applicable.
• We have started to migrate from the old SDK to the latest SDKs for Service Bus, Event Hubs, Relay and Notification Hubs. Therefore, new classes should not depend on the old SDK unless absolutely necessary.

Development Environment

Visual Studio 2022 17.8.0 or later is required to build the solution.

When editing UI elements Visual Studio should run as a DPI-unaware process. For more information about this, see the Visual Studio documentation. In Visual Studio 2022 the informational bar looks like this when it is running as a DPI-unaware process.

Azure Service Bus

Microsoft Azure Service Bus is a reliable information delivery service. The purpose of this service is to make communication easier. When two or more parties want to exchange information, they need a communication facilitator. Service Bus is a brokered, or third-party communication mechanism. This is similar to a postal service in the physical world. Postal services make it very easy to send different kinds of letters and packages with a variety of delivery guarantees, anywhere in the world.

Similar to the postal service delivering letters, Service Bus is flexible information delivery from both the sender and the recipient. The messaging service ensures that the information is delivered even if the two parties are never both online at the same time, or if they aren't available at the exact same time. In this way, messaging is similar to sending a letter, while non-brokered communication is similar to placing a phone call (or how a phone call used to be - before call waiting and caller ID, which are much more like brokered messaging).

The message sender can also require a variety of delivery characteristics including transactions, duplicate detection, time-based expiration, and batching. These patterns have postal analogies as well: repeat delivery, required signature, address change, or recall.

For more information, feel free to read the official documentation here.

Service Bus Explorer for Windows Server

The Service Bus Explorer 2.1.0 can be used with the Service Bus for Windows Server 1.1. The Service Bus Explorer 2.1.0 uses a version of the Microsoft.ServiceBus.dll client library which is compatible with the Service Bus for Windows Server 1.1 RTM version. You can download the source code of the Service Bus Explorer 2.1.0 here.

Documentation

Here you can find the tool documentation and a log of the features implemented over time.

Alternative Service Bus Management Tools

Service Bus Explorer is only one of the management tools available for Azure Service Bus.

Here are a couple of alternatives. We do not take responsibility for them though: