We're looking at using Amazon SQS (Simple Queue Service) for a project. One end of the queue will be a Ruby on Rails application, the other end will be our Suneido application. There is code we can use from Ruby, but not from Suneido. (The new Programming Amazon Web Services is quite helpful.)
As with S3, the issue is the authentication. Amazon web services use HMAC-SHA1. For S3 we ended up using a separate external command line program, but we couldn't find anything similar for SQS.
I looked at adding SHA1 to Suneido (it already has MD5) but using the Win32 crypto api's is very confusing.
We found a command line sha1sum and figured we could use it. In my ignorance I didn't realize the difference between straight SHA1 and HMAC-SHA1. So much for using sha1sum.
Writing (or using) something in Java was another possibility, especially since I'm in the middle of Java right now, but then we'd have to worry about whether or not our clients have the Java runtime, and which version.
With our clients, on Windows, .Net is a safer bet. I looked at Amazon's C# sample code and the HMAC-SHA1 part looked pretty simple - .Net has an HMACSHA1 class that makes it pretty easy.
So I downloaded the free Microsoft Visual C# 2008 Express and wrote my very first C# program. The source is only 25 lines long and I copied most of it from other sources. (I had some problems with installing Visual C# - it took forever and I had to restart the install several times. Not sure what was going on.)
One thing that impressed me was the size of the resulting exe - 4.5 kb! Of course, it's using the .Net framework, which is huge, but as long as our clients already have that, I don't really care. In the old days, you could write tiny programs like that, but bloated exe's have become pretty much standard.
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