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.

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.

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.