Service Bus Workbench
Explore Azure Service Bus queues, topics and subscriptions from VS Code: peek and receive messages, send and resend them, and keep a history of everything you sent.
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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 your Azure CLI sign-in, or to the local emulator with one click.
- Queues, topics and subscriptions in one tree, with active and dead-letter message counts.
- Peek a queue or subscription 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. Tick several rows to resend them in one go.
- Move back dead-lettered messages, the ones you tick or the oldest ones up to the count: each one is sent again to its queue or topic and removed from the dead-letter queue only once the send succeeds.
- Read-only mode for a connection, so nothing can be sent to it or removed from it by mistake.
- Sent history of every send and resend, including the failed ones, with "Edit and Send Again" and "Send Again As-is". Search it, and group it by queue or by day.
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. Either with the Microsoft account signed in to VS Code, or with Azure CLI or environment credentials (
DefaultAzureCredential: az login, azd, environment variables, managed identity).
- Local emulator: the Service Bus emulator on
localhost with its default ports (5672 and 5300). Listing queues and topics needs emulator 2.0 or later. For an emulator on another host or port, use Connection string with its own connection string (UseDevelopmentEmulator=true); you are asked for the management port.
- Expand the connection, then a queue or a subscription of a topic, and select Messages or Dead-letter.
Read-only mode
Right-click a connection and select Enable Read-only Mode to hide and refuse everything that sends or removes messages on it: send, resend, receive and delete, and move back. Peeking still works. The mode is local to your VS Code; nothing changes in Azure.
Permissions
| To |
Entra ID (RBAC role) |
Connection string (claim) |
| List queues, topics and subscriptions, and see counts |
Azure Service Bus Data Owner, or Owner of the namespace. Reader is enough for connections added with "browse my subscriptions" |
Manage |
| Peek / receive |
Azure Service Bus Data Receiver |
Listen |
| Send |
Azure Service Bus Data Sender |
Send |
Being Owner or Reader of the namespace is enough to list its entities, 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 |
serviceBusWorkbench.history.groupBy |
none |
Group the Sent History view by queue or by day |
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
- On session-enabled queues and subscriptions, peek and send work (set a Session ID), but receive and delete and move back do not.
- A message read from a subscription is resent or moved back to its topic, so every subscription of that topic receives it again.
- A connection string for a single entity (with
EntityPath) is treated as a queue.
- Listing through Azure Resource Manager with the Reader role only works for connections added with "browse my subscriptions" from this version on.
- 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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