Skills Lab: Remote Messaging With Hangfire & Azure Service Bus

In this skills lab I am exploring remote Hangfire job execution using a common pub/sub pattern with Azure Service Bus.

Prerequisites

In order to clone and run this project you must obtain the following:

• Hangfire Ace licence with access to the private NuGet feed for throttling

• Access to a SQL Server instance with two databases on it using Windows authentication, hf_server_a and hf_server_b

• Azure subscription with a Service Bus resource:

  • Make sure you copy the connection string to add the appsettings later
  • Setup the following Queues in the Service Bus Namespace: servera and serverb

  

🚧👷‍♂️ Build & Run

1. Roll through each of the ServerX and ClientX projects and create an appsettings.Development.json file

   1. For the ClientX project settings, specify the following:

   {
       "ConnectionStrings": {
           "HangfireConnection": "Server={YOUR SQL SERVER};Database={hf_server_a|hf_server_b};Trusted_Connection=True;",
           "ServiceBusConnection": "{YOUR SERVICE BUS CONNECTION STRING}"
       }
   }

   1. For the ServerX project settings, specify the following:

   {
       "ConnectionStrings": {
           "HangfireConnection": "Server={YOUR SQL SERVER};Database={hf_server_a|hf_server_b};Trusted_Connection=True;",
           "ServiceBusConnection": "{YOUR SERVICE BUS CONNECTION STRING}"
       },
       "ServiceBusListeningQueueName": "{servera|serverb}"
   }

2. Configure the startup projects for the solution to start both ServerX and both ClientX applications

3. Run the solution

✅ Output

1. On startup, you should get two browser windows displaying the Swagger UI for each ClientX, split the windows side-by-side

2. Duplicate the Swagger UI tabs and change the URL to /hangfire, the Hangfire dashboard will appear

3. Against Server A Swagger UI, expand the enqueue endpoint and using the Try It Out feature, make a request
   

4. Switch to the Hangfire Dashboard tabs and observe the realtime graph report one job execution (on both sides)

5. In both dashboards, go to Jobs > Succeeded:

   • On ServerA (source), you will see a successful job and console logs for IRunRemoteWorkflow.Run
   • On ServerB (subscribed listener), you will see a successful job and console logs for IRunWorkflow.Run which has received the message and performed the job, using message parameters