Counting Messages in an MSMQ MessageQueue from C#

Surprisingly, this not as easy as MessageQueue.Count; When I searched for how to do this, I kept seeing solutions that required use of COM interop or Performance Counters. I didn’t really like either of those suggestions so I figured I’d just try Peek with a cursor. I was pleasantly surprised to find that this method was more than adequate for my needs. I ran this against a queue with 1000 (relatively small) messages and, including the time to open the queue, this took only 0.04 seconds. I was using private, transactional queues. I haven’t tested any other scenarios. But for my needs, this worked fine.

protected Message PeekWithoutTimeout(MessageQueue q, Cursor cursor, PeekAction action)
{
	Message ret = null;
	try
	{
		ret = q.Peek(new TimeSpan(1), cursor, action);
	}
	catch (MessageQueueException mqe)
	{
		if (!mqe.Message.ToLower().Contains("timeout"))
		{
			throw;
		}
	}
	return ret;
}

protected int GetMessageCount(MessageQueue q)
{
	int count = 0;
	Cursor cursor = q.CreateCursor();

	Message m = PeekWithoutTimeout(q, cursor, PeekAction.Current);
	if (m != null)
	{
		count = 1;
		while ((m = PeekWithoutTimeout(q, cursor, PeekAction.Next)) != null)
		{
			count++;
		}
	}
	return count;			
}

Enjoy.