During the month of September, there is going to be a series of webcasts targeting financial services developers. It looks like a few of the talks in the series would be of interest to distributed application developers. I'm assuming that all of the talks in this series presuppose a strong interest in developing financial services. Note that the times for these talks are in EST.

Kickoff: Building Connected Systems in Financial Services
11:00am to 12:30pm EST on 9/6/2006

Workflow Enablement in Banking (Level 200)
11:00am to 12:30pm EST on 9/7/2006

Learn The ABCs Of Programming Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) for WINFX (Level 300)
11:00am to 12:30pm EST on 9/11/2006

You can get the complete list of talks from Microsoft Financial Services.