So a question came up in the Azure training session today about what the timeout was before a ‘Dequeued’ message was returned to the quen unless it was ‘Removed’. Windows Azure is designed to ensure your messages will always be completed so it returns a dequeud message to a queu if it has not be permanently removed after a period of time.

I knew it had to be configurable… but had no idea exactly how.

The answer is here in the SDK

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd179396.aspx

or, if you are using the StorageClient sample code from .NET (and if you are using .NET then you really should be!) then this post from Neill Kidd should help

http://blogs.msdn.com/neilkidd/archive/2008/12/07/poison-in-windows-azure.aspx

// Get message with 60 sec visibility
Message msg = queue.GetMessage(60);

This means to ‘Dequeue’ a message only place that message back on the queue if RemoveMessage has not been called within 60 seconds.