MSFT Research Rock

I loved this morning’s keynote on research. I saw the SkyServer stuff @ an internal research event last year. Coolest part: you can download a slice of the database and run it locally. Jim Gray is sitting on the floor behind me as I blog talking about SkyServer futures. Don just finished his session Indigo and the Future of Distributed Computing. I guess Jim couldn’t get a seat for that.

A couple of people jumped on Don after the talk to discuss transactions across services. This is a bad bad bad idea. For those @ PDC, come to the architecture symposium tomorrow in room 152/153. My job is to connect with the architect community so come get my business card.

WinFS is my favorite new feature

Lots of oohs and aahs for Avalon, but I am much more excited about WinFS. I’m very interested in seeing how blogging evolves in the Longhorn wave.

Themeing ASP.NET Whidbey

I just worked thru the ASP.NET Whidbey Personalization HOL. The docs on Whidbey’s new theme feature aren’t done, so this is the first instance I’ve seen on how to use this feature. Pretty cool stuff. The Whidbey Alpha only includes 2 themes: SmokeAndGlass and BasicBlue, but the HOL shows how to build your own (albeit an incredibly ugly one).

Only issue is that it seems (in the alpha at least) that the theme support is something the developer adds. But tools like .Text let you specify custom settings so the blog author can have a custom theme of their own design specified @ runtime. I wonder if later versions of Whidbey will have similar support.

Weblogger’s BOF

I just got back from the Weblogger’s BOF, which had impromptu meetings going on for an hour past the scheduled end time. Lots of great discussion, not a lot of agreement. There seem to be several threads of discussion. I spent a bunch of time with Peter Provost & Chris Hollander afterwards talking about how to scale a news aggregator to handle thousands of weblogs. Scoble reads over 600 and I don’t know how he keeps up with it. I did have to convince Peter that weblog discovery is not the issue – if something gets posted in blogsphere of value, chances are someone you read will link to it. That’s the nature of a highly interconnected network like blogsphere.

To top it off, I got to spend a while chatting with Peter Drayton, who seems poised to return to blogging after a nine month absence. We chatted about Rotor, the CLR team, REST, ATOM and a replacement for Radio (dasBlog, of course). I think I’m going to need to spend a week on campus pinballing between offices once I get back from PDC.

In LA Finally

Well, I finally made it. I missed the first day, but I did make it to the vendor expo where I saw (among others) Chris, Clemens, Scott, Doug, DonXML, Robert, Jeff and Bob. Weblogger’s BOF is in about 30 minutes. See you there.