The latest Microsoft Architecture Journal (#17) talks about distributed computing and the associated architectural patterns.
 
A few of our colleagues, at Managed Solution team, have put together an excellent article based on patterns harvested from our customer engagements, mapping real world real-world scenarios to patterns and then describing how said patterns were implemented on current technologies. This article discusses various aspects with respect to the architectural patterns found in common scenarios such as
1. implementation of applications/services;
2. consumption of services from within and external to organizations; and
3. administration of services or composite services.
 
This article also talks about Distributed Connectivity Service (DCS), a wizard-driven toolkit (software factory) and runtime, to provide guidance on developing and hosting business processes. This article further discusses the service virtualization aspects and architectural patterns exposed through Managed Service Engine (MSE), BizTalk and Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Guidance components.
 
Read on ... 
"Architectural Patterns for Distributed Computing"

Architecture Resource Center