The Message itself
If you look closely at the sample code in Sending a Message, you will notice that the body of the message is simply a text string. As we mentioned earlier, this is a simplification that we used for the example. In reality, the message that is sent to and received from the queue is a byte array. In other words, it can be pretty much any structure you want, including such things as text, COM objects, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and ADO recordsets. This flexibility gives you the ability to pass all manner of items from one application to another. Of course, the down side is that both the sending and receiving application need to agree on the format of the message. So long as this is true, you can post almost anything your heart desires into a message.