.NET includes a managed MSMQ API (System.Messaging) to send and receive messages, but unfortunately there's a key functionality missing: obtaining the number of messages currently in the queue. Yoel Arnon talks about this problem with more detail here and here. After reading that, we learn that there are three ways to overcome this limitation: using the MSMQ performance counters (with the .NET Performance Counter API or via WMI), using the MSMQ COM wrapper, or using the MSMQ Admin API directly. The first option is not very reliable and the second one is not available on all versions of MSMQ, so...