Reading MSMQ contents with Powershell

This article will present two ways to read a MSMQ (Microsoft Message Queue) using Powershell. First, the queue will be read using the GetString method of System.Text.UTF8Encoding:

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.Messaging") | Out-Null
 
$queuePath = ".\private$\myqueue"

$queue = New-Object System.Messaging.MessageQueue $queuePath

foreach ($message in $queue.GetAllMessages()){

 Write-Host (New-Object System.Text.UTF8Encoding).GetString($message.BodyStream.ToArray())

 Write-Host $msg 
}

As an alternative, it is also possible to use the StreamReader (more ceremony really):

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.Messaging") | Out-Null
 
$queuePath = ".\private$\myqueue"

$queue = New-Object System.Messaging.MessageQueue $queuePath

foreach ($message in $queue.GetAllMessages()){

 Write-Host ([Environment]::NewLine)

 $sr = New-Object System.IO.StreamReader($message.BodyStream)

 $message.Formatter = New-Object System.Messaging.XmlMessageFormatter(@(""));
 
 $msg = "";

 while ($sr.Peek() -ge 0){
  $msg += $sr.ReadLine()
 }

 Write-Host $msg 
}

Actually, I was needing a simple way to look at some messages sent with the NetMsmqBinding in WCF, so making a Powershell script seemed the quickest way! WCF does some strange formatting on the message that is sent through the wire, you can though see that our two alternatives gives also a bit different formatting, the first alternative being the most clean and with shortest syntax.

As the reader can see, the contents of the MSMQ queue that the NetMsmqBinding uses shows unreadable characters. That is because the MSMQ message item are containing actually WCF Messages. QueueExplorer showed me this fact, so next article will present a more lengthy version where the content can be properly decoded using Powershell to the rescue!