How to configure number of retries for processing failed Azure queue message before it will be moved to poison queue

In my previous post I showed how to configure Azure web job host to set number of queue messages which may be processed simultaneously (in parallel): How to set limit on simultaneously processed queue messages with continuous Azure web job. In this post I will show how to configure web job host for processing failed messages.

As it was mentioned in previous post when message is added to Azure queue runtime will call method with 1st parameter decorated with [QueueTrigger] attribute. If there was unhandled exception this message will be marked as failed. Azure runtime will try to process this message again - by default there are maximum 5 retries for failed messages.

If we don't need to make 5 attempts (e.g. if our logic requires only 1 attempt) we may change this behavior using the following code:

public virtual void RunContinuous()
{
    var storageConn = ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["AzureWebJobsDashboard"].ConnectionString;
    var config = new JobHostConfiguration();
    
    config.Queues.MaxDequeueCount = 1;
    
    var host = new JobHost(config);
    host.RunAndBlock();
}
 
public void ProcessQueueMessage([QueueTrigger("orders")]string message, TextWriter log)
{
    log.WriteLine("New message has arrived from queue");
    ...
}

I.e. we set config.Queues.MaxDequeueCount to 1. In this case failed message will be moved to poison queue immediately and web job won't try to process it again.