In the next two blogs, we are going to discuss how to do message queuing on mobile devices through the Azure platform. This post is about using the Azure Queue Service. The next one is about using Azure Service Bus

Azure Storage has Queue Service for reliable, persistent messaging between Web and Worker role instances. There also exist some libraries for Phone 7, iPhone and Android to access the Azure message queue(http://watoolkitwp7.codeplex.com/). So we could use the Azure Queue Service as a way to communicate between mobile applications on various mobile devices. However Queue Service for mobile devices lacks a couple of important message queue features which include reliable message delivery for mobile device and a publish-subscribe delivery model. To solve the first issue, we could

- use a mobile storage to cache messages.

- let the messaging client write the messages into the local storage when Azure is not accessible, read the cached messages from the local storage and send them to the Azure queues.

To solve the second issue, we could implement the logic in Messaging Service and Messaging Client.