title: Azure Service Bus - subscribers can independently subscribe to a subscription and share the same message?
body: <p>I'm new to Azure Service Bus and have created successful pocs for creating a topic and a separate subscriber application to receive its message.</p>
  
  <p>Based on this article, I quote:
  <em>"A topic can have up to 2,000 subscriptions associated with it, each of which gets independent copies of all messages sent to the topic. One or more subscribers can independently subscribe to a subscription and <strong>compete</strong> for messages from it."</em></p>
  
  <p><a href="http://convective.wordpress.com/2011/06/08/windows-azure-appfabric-service-bus-queues-and-topics/">http://convective.wordpress.com/2011/06/08/windows-azure-appfabric-service-bus-queues-and-topics/</a></p>
  
  <p>What I'm interested to do is to expand this for multiple applications to independently subscribe to the same topic, but <strong>not compete</strong> for them. </p>
  
  <p>My current poc has one sender and two separate applications subscribed to the same topic and subscription. The behavior that I'm seeing is that if I post one message from the sender, either one of the two running subscribing applications will receive it; but not the other.</p>
  
  <p>My question is if multiple, independent applications can receive the same topic message? Any advice would be greatly appreciated!</p>