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.

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.

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.

I didn’t make it out yesterday, and so I got rebooked on a flight this morning. Now that flight has been canceled. I guess I’ll see everyone @ PDC tomorrow. I should change my flair to “I Hope I’ll Be There Soon”.

Like alot of other people, I’m stuck trying to get to LA for PDC. PDC + USC/UW game yesterday + fires closing LAX have screwed everything up royally. They just made an announcement for a flight into Ontario that is in final boarding, so maybe that’s a good sign that my flight that was supposed to leave 15 minutes ago will go soon. Seen a couple of ‘softies, including my boss’s boss’s boss Eric Rudder. He’s on standby for my flight. Thought I saw Brad Merrill waiting in Alaska Airlines customer service line (which is about 2 miles long).