ServiceBusExplorer

Service Bus Explorer 允许用户轻松连接到 Service Bus 命名空间并管理消息传输实体。该工具提供了高级功能,

Author: Paolo Salvatori (@babosbird)
Collaborators: Sean Feldman (@sfeldman) and Erik Mogensen (@koltrast)
Contributors: Many

Service Bus Explorer

The Service Bus Explorer allows users to efficiently administer messaging entities. The tool provides advanced features like import/export functionality and the ability to test topic, queues, subscriptions, relay services, notification hubs and events hubs.

Features

Dashboard tab — live overview of message counts (Active, Dead Letter, Scheduled, Total) for all queues and subscriptions, with auto-refresh and color-coded dead-letter alerts
TreeView search/filter — real-time filtering of queues, topics and subscriptions; press Ctrl+F to focus
Copy message body — one-click clipboard copy from the message preview pane
Microsoft Entra ID sign-in — interactive browser authentication for Azure Service Bus namespaces without storing SAS secrets locally
Import/export of namespace configuration
Send, receive and peek messages for queues, topics and subscriptions
Dead-letter message management
Relay services, Notification Hubs and Event Hubs support

Software requirements

The following software is required to run ServiceBusExplorer. It may run on other versions.

Windows 10 or later
.NET Framework 4.6.2

Installation

It is strongly recommended to set Configuration File for Settings and Connection Strings to User Configuration File as shown in the figure below to reduce problems when upgrading.

Note: The ServiceBusExplorer.exe.config in the application directory will get overwritten during the upgrade.

If you have made changes to it, you should back it up before upgrading. If you follow the recommendation above then only advanced changes such as WCF configuration modifications cause this.

Do not overwite the new configuration file with the old file since the runtime section in the new must file not be modified.

Using Chocolatey

Installing for the first time

choco install ServiceBusExplorer

Upgrading

choco upgrade ServiceBusExplorer

The default location of the executable is C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\lib\ServiceBusExplorer\tools\ServiceBusExplorer.exe.

More information on our Chocolatey page.

Using Scoop

_Warning The scoop package is not maintained by the ServiceBusExplorer project so carefully check the package and the URLs it uses before using it. Also, the current package keeps the old version of ServiceBusExplorer.exe.config. That may cause assembly loading issues so do not use it for upgrading.

scoop install extras/servicebusexplorer

The default location of the executable is %USERPROFILE%\scoop\apps\servicebusexplorer\current\tools\ServiceBusExplorer.exe.

Using GitHub

curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/paolosalvatori/ServiceBusExplorer/releases/latest | grep browser_download_url | cut -d '"' -f 4

Using Winget

winget install --id paolosalvatori.ServiceBusExplorer --source winget

Microsoft Entra ID / Azure AD sign-in

Service Bus Explorer supports interactive browser sign-in for Azure Service Bus namespaces on the public Azure cloud. Sovereign clouds (Azure Government, Azure China, etc.) are not currently supported.

How to connect

Open the regular Service Bus connection dialog.
Select Select a service bus namespace... for a manual connection, or edit an existing saved connection.
Change Authentication to Entra.
Enter the namespace endpoint as either sb://<namespace>.servicebus.windows.net/ or <namespace>.servicebus.windows.net.
Optionally enter Tenant ID and Entity Path. If Tenant ID is left blank, Service Bus Explorer uses the organizations endpoint. In that case the sign-in flow accepts work or school accounts only. To sign in with a personal Microsoft account, enter the target tenant ID; note that the account must already have been invited into that tenant as a guest and been granted a Service Bus data role, otherwise sign-in succeeds but every operation is refused.
Click OK and complete the browser sign-in flow.

Note

The File -> Connect to Event Grid menu entry is for Event Grid, not Azure Service Bus. For Service Bus, use the normal connection dialog and switch the Authentication selector to Entra.

Cached credentials

The logged-in user's credentials are cached. In some scenarios it may be necessary to log out from Entra to switch users. Use the menu item "Log out from Entra" for that. This clears the credentials cached by Service Bus Explorer only; it does not sign you out of Entra in your browser, so a new sign-in may still pick the same account automatically unless you also sign out there.

Screenshots

Use the regular Service Bus connection flow, not the Event Grid-specific menu entry:

Open the normal connection dialog:

Switch Authentication to Entra:

Enter the namespace endpoint and optionally select an Entra Tenant ID from the list. You may also enter a Tenant ID that is not in the list. If you save the connection it will store the Tenant ID with the connection:

The list of Entra Tenant IDs is managed in the Options | Authentication dialog:

After sign-in, the namespace can be browsed without storing SAS keys locally:

Saved connection string format

Saved Entra-based connections use the following format:

Endpoint=sb://<namespace>.servicebus.windows.net/;AuthMode=AAD;TenantId=<tenant-id>;TransportType=Amqp;EntityPath=<entity-path>

Minimal example:

Endpoint=sb://<namespace>.servicebus.windows.net/;AuthMode=AAD

Current scope

Interactive browser sign-in only
Entra mode currently loads Service Bus queues and topics (with subscriptions), plus Event Hubs when the namespace is detected as an Event Hubs namespace
Notification Hubs and Relay are not loaded when Entra authentication is selected
Local persistence stores metadata only, not passwords or SAS keys
Managed identity, Azure CLI auth and service principal auth are not included in this feature

Contributions

There are no dedicated developers so development is entirely based on voluntary effort.

Here are some guidelines concerning contributions:

All contributions should be done on main.
Every pull request is built by GitHub Actions and should preferably be linked to a GitHub issue.
Write unit tests, if applicable.
We have started to migrate from the old SDK to the latest SDKs for Service Bus, Event Hubs, Relay and Notification Hubs. Therefore, new classes should not depend on the old SDK unless absolutely necessary.

Development Environment

Visual Studio 2022 17.8.0 or later is required to build the solution.

When editing UI elements Visual Studio should run as a DPI-unaware process. For more information about this, see the Visual Studio documentation. In Visual Studio 2022 the informational bar looks like this
when it is running as a DPI-unaware process.

Azure Service Bus

Microsoft Azure Service Bus is a reliable information delivery service. The purpose of this service is to make communication easier. When two or more parties want to exchange information, they need a communication facilitator. Service Bus is a brokered, or third-party communication mechanism. This is similar to a postal service in the physical world. Postal services make it very easy to send different kinds of letters and packages with a variety of delivery guarantees, anywhere in the world.

Similar to the postal service delivering letters, Service Bus is flexible information delivery from both the sender and the recipient. The messaging service ensures that the information is delivered even if the two parties are never both online at the same time, or if they aren't available at the exact same time. In this way, messaging is similar to sending a letter, while non-brokered communication is similar to placing a phone call (or how a phone call used to be - before call waiting and caller ID, which are much more like brokered messaging).

The message sender can also require a variety of delivery characteristics including transactions, duplicate detection, time-based expiration, and batching. These patterns have postal analogies as well: repeat delivery, required signature, address change, or recall.

For more information, feel free to read the official documentation here.