As we were working on creating the API for Queues and Topics inside the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus team, we had a set of diverging opinions on what the message format should be. Some of us (Clemens, the speaker of this session, included) argued that the message format and object-model should be the same as the one for WCF – some argued that the message should be specific to Queues and Topics. As we were having those discussions it occurred to us that the same kind of debate was happening in synchronous messaging with the grand and protracted war of REST vs. SOAP. And as we started thinking about the parallels it because fairly clear that we were indeed having the exact same debate. In this session Clemens will discuss the findings, the outcome of our debate on the subject, and an analysis of why those debates even exist – which will hopefully enable you to make better decisions on what API abstraction level you want to buy into for your applications