If you want to ramp up on SOA then here are some suggested links and references. I've compiled this for the bootcamp we are running next month but the list is useful for general SOA rampup/refresh I hope.

Pat Helland is a leading thinker and excellent speaker on all matters SOA. His talks and papers can be found on his website.

MSDN has an architecture section with references to some great articles on SOA. In particular there is an MSDN subsection on SOA that is a good starting point. Ever wanted to refresh your memory of all those WS-* standards and what they are for, this is a great article from MSDN (refreshed oct, 2004).

Some great work on reference applications has been done over the past 18  months. Two in particular are worth reading about. The first is the Enterprise Development Reference Architecture (EDRA - this used to be called ShadowFax), a support article from Microsoft references the most important EDRA links. The second is FABRIQ a high performance queing architecture and implementation.

The Microsoft Patterns and Practices material is still the best reference material for solution architecture guidance on the Microsoft platform. All the guides, code, and operational practices can be referenced from here.

Finally a book. I recently skimmed this book "Expert Service-Oriented Architecture in C#: Using the Web Services Enhancements 2.0" by Jeffrey Hasan, ISBN 1590593901. Good approach and uses the latest tools (WSE 2.0)

Please add to this list with your favourite sources and books !

p.s. If you are attending the bootcamp, you do not require a laptop but if you have one then bring it along for notetaking or to run the samples. The samples will require VS.NET 2003, WSE2.0 SP2 , and EIF (Enterprise Instrumentation Framework).