How to read msmq messages (me, not the pc)

Question

I want to look inside my queues, the msm console snapin has this property dialog, but it is very difficult to read and the messages which are important to me are encoded and loo

Answer 1

I found these two methods while searching for an answer to this question and they actually worked perfectly.

    public System.Xml.XmlDocument ConvertToXMLDoc(System.Messaging.Message msg)
    {
        byte[] buffer = new byte[msg.BodyStream.Length];
        msg.BodyStream.Read(buffer, 0, (int)msg.BodyStream.Length);
        int envelopeStart = FindEnvolopeStart(buffer);
        System.IO.MemoryStream stream = new System.IO.MemoryStream(buffer, envelopeStart, buffer.Length - envelopeStart);
        System.ServiceModel.Channels.BinaryMessageEncodingBindingElement elm = new System.ServiceModel.Channels.BinaryMessageEncodingBindingElement();
        System.ServiceModel.Channels.Message msg1 = elm.CreateMessageEncoderFactory().Encoder.ReadMessage(stream, Int32.MaxValue);
        System.Xml.XmlDocument doc = new System.Xml.XmlDocument();
        doc.Load(msg1.GetReaderAtBodyContents());
        msg.BodyStream.Position = 0;
        return doc;
    }

    private int FindEnvolopeStart(byte[] stream)
    {
        int i = 0;
        byte prevByte = stream[i];
        byte curByte = (byte)0;
        for (i = 0; i < stream.Length; i++)            
        {
            curByte = stream[i];
            if (curByte == (byte)0x02 &&
            prevByte == (byte)0x56)
                break;
            prevByte = curByte;
        }
        return i - 1;
    }

Simply call the ConvertToXmlDoc function, providing the message from the message queue and you'll get an XmlDocument back. I am lazy, so I just drop the innerXml into a file so I can read it.

    MessageQueue queue = new MessageQueue(queueName);
    var msg = queue.Receive();
    var doc = ConvertToXMLDoc(msg);                
    using (var sw = new StreamWriter(@"C:\message.txt")))
           sw.Write(doc.InnerXml);

No application to buy and you get your data back in code so you can mess around with it.

PS: Credit where credit is due. The snippet came from http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/wcf/thread/c03d80cd-492c-4ece-8890-6a35b12352e0 , which also links to a more detailed discussion of MSMQ's encoding format.