Service Bus Workbench
Explore Azure Service Bus queues from VS Code: peek and receive messages, send and resend them, and keep a history of everything you sent.
Note. Everything below has been tested against the local Service Bus emulator. Connecting with Microsoft Entra ID has also been verified against a real Azure namespace; AMQP over WebSockets has not been verified yet. Please report any problem.
Features
- Connections with a connection string (for a namespace or a single queue), with Microsoft Entra ID using the Microsoft account signed in to VS Code, or to the local emulator with one click.
- Queue tree with active and dead-letter message counts.
- Peek a queue and its dead-letter queue, with paging ("Load more") and the full body, properties and dead-letter reason of each message.
- Receive and delete, always behind an explicit confirmation.
- Send messages with content type, subject, message ID, correlation ID, session ID and application properties.
- Resend a message you are looking at, for example from the dead-letter queue, editing it first if you need to.
- Sent history of every send and resend, including the failed ones, with "Edit and Send Again" and "Send Again As-is".
Getting started
- Open the Service Bus Workbench view in the activity bar.
- Select Add Connection and pick how to connect:
- Connection string: a namespace-level or queue-level shared access (SAS) connection string.
- Microsoft Entra ID: browse your subscriptions, or enter the namespace host name.
- Local emulator: the Service Bus emulator on
localhost with its default ports (5672 and 5300). Listing queues needs emulator 2.0 or later.
- Expand the connection, then a queue, and select Messages or Dead-letter.
Permissions
| To |
Entra ID (RBAC role) |
Connection string (claim) |
| List queues and see counts |
Azure Service Bus Data Owner, or Owner of the namespace |
Manage |
| Peek / receive |
Azure Service Bus Data Receiver |
Listen |
| Send |
Azure Service Bus Data Sender |
Send |
Being Owner of the namespace is enough to list queues, but it does not give access to messages: peeking, receiving and sending require the data roles.
A connection string for a single queue (with EntityPath) works without the Manage claim: that queue is shown, without counts.
Settings
| Setting |
Default |
Description |
serviceBusWorkbench.peekBatchSize |
50 |
Messages to peek or receive at a time |
serviceBusWorkbench.useWebSockets |
false |
Use AMQP over WebSockets (port 443) when a firewall blocks port 5671 |
serviceBusWorkbench.history.enabled |
true |
Record sends and resends in the Sent History view |
serviceBusWorkbench.history.maxEntries |
500 |
Maximum number of history entries |
Where your data is stored
- Connection strings are kept in VS Code secret storage, never in
settings.json.
- The sent history is a
history.json file in the extension's global storage, on your machine only. It contains message bodies: if you send sensitive data, turn the history off or clear it.
Known limitations
- Queues only; topics and subscriptions are not supported yet.
- On session-enabled queues, peek and send work (set a Session ID), but receive and delete does not.
- A resend keeps the body, properties and IDs; it does not keep the time to live or the scheduled time.
- With the emulator, counts are obtained by peeking and are shown as
100+ from 100 messages.
License
MIT
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