Azure Queues: Retry Poison Messages

Currently, the Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer doesn’t have the ability to move messages from one Azure queue to another. During development, I sometimes need to retry messages that are in the poison message queue. A poison message is a message that has exceeded the maximum number of delivery attempts to the application. This happens when a queue-based application cannot process a message because of errors.

It’s not difficult to write, but thought it might save someone a few minutes, so I’m posting it here. You’ll need to add a NuGet package reference to Microsoft.NET.Sdk.Functions

using Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Storage;
using Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Storage.Queue;

void Main()
{
    const string queuename = "MyQueueName";

    string storageAccountString = "xxxxxx";

    RetryPoisonMesssages(storageAccountString, queuename);
}

private static int RetryPoisonMesssages(string storageAccountString, string queuename)
{
    CloudQueue targetqueue = GetCloudQueueRef(storageAccountString, queuename);
    CloudQueue poisonqueue = GetCloudQueueRef(storageAccountString, queuename + "-poison");

    int count = 0;
    while (true)
    {
        var msg = poisonqueue.GetMessage();
        if (msg == null)
            break;

        poisonqueue.DeleteMessage(msg);
        targetqueue.AddMessage(msg);
        count++;
    }

    return count;
}

private static CloudQueue GetCloudQueueRef(string storageAccountString, string queuename)
{
    CloudStorageAccount storageAccount = CloudStorageAccount.Parse(storageAccountString);
    CloudQueueClient queueClient = storageAccount.CreateCloudQueueClient();
    CloudQueue queue = queueClient.GetQueueReference(queuename);

    return queue;
}