I am contemplating converting our internal application from MSMQ and WCF to SSB. We would like a more feature rich system with regards to our queuing.
However, I am not seeing a lot of implementations or general information if SSB is in use with .Net. The SSB blog is not very active and I see few posts in general on implementation successes or advice.
Is SSB used much? Are there better alternatives for queuing and .Net?
There is actually a lot of info out there (although I doubt it will tell you whether SSSB fits your needs):
To get an overview of several selected Service Broker deployments, take a look here. Several large companies (such as MySpace) have publicly announced that Service Broker is one of the essential foundations for their system's architecture.
The people I know who are using it (like MVP Denny Cherry of http://mrdenny.com) are very satisfied with it, but like you've figured out, very few people are using it relative to the general SQL Server population. There's a little bit of a barrier to entry because it's not intuitive for DBAs, and there's no GUI for it.
If you've got specific questions about it, email Denny, and he'd be glad to talk to you about it. He does user group presentations about it too.
We're using SSB for async processing of many different types of records, and it's a total breeze. Getting up to speed was a bit involved, but it was worth it. Using activation procedures saved us tons of time. Just imagine that you can dyanmically say 'i want this async process to have 10 threads to process items in the queue, but i want this other async process to only have 2 threads to process items in the queue'. That's all just a parameter on the activation stored procedure. I'd recommend look at Adam Mechanic's SSB tutorials on simple-talk.com.