Steve Vinoski reports here on the creation of a Working Group to advance the formalization of a standard spec for the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP). I think this is pretty interesting: Queuing mechanisms are an extremely powerful and very handy tool for many applications and are a great way to build certain kinds of distributed systems based around messaging. I'm certainly hoping someone will eventually build a .NET implementation of AMQP. Even more interesting would be a BizTalk adapter or, why not, a WCF channel for it.