Ross Tuck: Returning From Command Buses

On his site Ross Tuck has a post that covers a common design pattern, the Command Bus, how it relates to CQRS and that they shouldn't return anything. In the post he takes some of the most common questions about using a command bus and tries to clarify with the correct answer.

The most common question I get about my command bus library is: “can commands really return nothing?” The second most common question is “Why do you let commands return something, don’t you know that’s Wrong(tm)?”

It’s easy to get hung up on form, not function. That’s a shame because command buses aren’t important. In the grand scheme of things, they’re completely, utterly, totally unimportant. It’s all about where the messages are going, not how they get there.

Still, let’s take a look at some myths about command buses.

The questions he tackles include topics like the relationship between CQRS and command buses, if you should be using them together (dependencies) and some discussion about return values and the "right" way to do things.