Early chapters look at the rich design possibilities of MSMQ, including reliable asynchronous communications (where parties do not have to be online together) and today's three-tiered architectures (where business rules are kept on the server). From this general perspective, Designing Applications with MSMQ moves to practical examples of an MSMQ program written two ways: through COM objects that work with tools, such as Visual Basic and Visual C++, and a more basic C API. Once a simple MSMQ program is created, the author shows how it can be enhanced, by making it asynchronous, for instance, for offline message delivery.