IBM's new MQ Blog includes some good .NET stuff

The MQ Engineers at IBM’s Hursley Lab (near Winchester, England) now have a blog. (By the way, the Hursley campus is just gorgeous.)

The blog is pretty new, started only last month, as far as I can tell, but it is already chock-full of interesting, high-content posts. I learned about it when Saket Rungta of IBM sent me an email.

I want to call your attention to a couple of entries in particular.

· “the Simplest MQ Publish/Subscribe Ever”, this one features IronPython, and XMS.NET.

The author shows how to build a publisher and a subscriber, in python running on .NET. The app uses the XMS.NET library to connect to the MQ Resource. Nifty!

https://hursleyonwmq.wordpress.com/2007/02/13/simplest-websphere-mq-publishsubscribeever/

· “WebSphere MQ Scripting using PowerShell”

https://hursleyonwmq.wordpress.com/2007/02/12/websphere-mq-scripting-using-powershell/

This is pretty cool. See, here's the thing about Powershell - it is a .NET-enabled scripting environment, so if you have a .NET class library (Such as IBM's MQ Classes for .NET), you can do pretty much anything that is enabled by that class library. Which means, from the script you can create queues, clear queues, delete queues, and so on. Anything you can do from the class library.

One editorial comment: One of the ideas embraced by PowerShell is that APIs are not the right level of abstraction for Administrators. PowerShell introduces the ideas of "Cmdlets" and "functions" - very small pieces of code focused on delivering the right user experience to admins and other people who would use scripts. It would be cool to have a powershell library for MQ - something with the right level of verb-noun abstractions. I imagine it would be a pretty thin layer. It's on my increasingly long list of things to investigate.

Kudos to IBM for the new blog!