A message gate is the message endpoint for a client or service in a distributed computing environment. A message gate may provide a secure message endpoint that sends and receives type-safe messages. A gate may have a gate name that is a unique ID that refers only to the gate. A gate may be implemented as a layer above a device's transport layer (e.g. networking sockets). The gate name for each gate may be bound to a transport reference. Multiple gates may share the same message transport. The transport reference may be a transport URI or socket reference and may provide a mechanism for naming an underlying transport and sharing the transport with other gates. Multiple local gates may include a reference to the same transport, however, each local gate may behave independently of the other local gates sending and receiving messages to and from its paired remote gate.