In Juval Lowy's WCF book he calls the pattern the Bridge pattern. dofactory has some good stuff on it too.
I've recently been collecting some links on the provider pattern for an MS exam I was studying for (70-568). Here's the list- more than you'll ever need to know about the Provider Model:
- Provider Model Design Pattern and Specification, Part 1 (old but detailed).
- The ASP.NET 2.0 Provider Model. 136 pages- a tomb of Provider Model information.
- ProviderBase- the base class for all provider implementations.
- Don’t forget to add when adding providers.
- Configuring Providers.
- Using the ASP.NET provider functionality in Windows based apps.
- Implementing a Membership Provider.
- Implementing a Role Provider.
- Creating a custom site map provider.
- Implementing a Profile Provider.
- Creating a custom DB profile provider.
- Session State Providers.
- Implementing a Session-State Store Provider.
