The little series I am currently writing here on my blog has inspired me to write way too more code than actually necessary to get my point across So by now I've got my own MSMQ transport for WSE 2.0 (yes, I know that others have written that already, but I am shooting for a "enterprise strength" implementation), a WebRequest/WebResponse pair to smuggle under arbitrary ASMX proxies and I am more than halfway done with a server-side host for MSMQ-to-ASMX (spelled out: ASP.NET Web Services).
What bugs me is that WSE 2.0's messaging model is "asynchronous only" and that it always performs a push/pull translation and that there is no way to push a message through to a service on the receiving thread. Whenever I grab a message from the queue and put it into my SoapTransport's "Dispatch()" method, the message gets queued up in an in-memory queue and that is then, on a concurrent thread, pulled (OnReceiveComplete) by the SoapReceivers collection and submitted into ProcessMessage() of the SoapReceiver (like any SoapService derived implementation) matching the target endpoint. So while I can dequeue from MSMQ within a transaction scope (ServiceDomain), that transaction scope doesn't make it across onto the thread that will actually execute the action inside the SoapReceiver/SoapService.
So now I am sitting here, contemplating and trying to figure out a workaround that doesn't require me to rewrite a big chunk of WSE 2.0 (which I am totally not shy of if that is what it takes). Transaction marshaling, thread synchronization, ah, I love puzzles. Once I am know how to solve this and have made the adjustments, I'll post the queue listener I promised to wrap up the series. The other code I've written in the process will likely surface in some other way.