Yesterday a couple of events happened that are pushing me even harder to find Whidbey like solutions for ASP.NET today.

#1 : Seven of the Rainbow core team met in person for the first time at John Mandia's place to discuss the present and future of Rainbow.  A few of us have been following Whidbey and we have a strong desire to build the next portal on top of it.  But, we are almost a year away from being able to run on the final ASP.NET 2.0 framework.  With Whidbey several months away we are planning a road-map for migration.  I believe we will have two tracks.  We will begin a complete rewrite of Rainbow using as many Whidbey tricks as possible.  The other track will be for improving the current version of the portal.  It is important to continue support for the existing product, but we will actively be making steps to add more Whidbey type functionality.  I was actually nominated to help guide enhancements to make sure they are are Whidbey-like as possible.  The biggest complaint I have heard against Rainbow is its skinning solution.  DotNetNuke has the same problem, but they are fixing it in their 2nd version.

#2 : I ran into a local project that was started for customized skinning.  It was amazingly complicated.  There were no CSS files and no HTML template type containers.  All of the HTML and Style code was stored in little pieces in a database and then tied together in a theme.  While this could be made into a very elegant solution, it was incredibly over-complicated for something that is traditionally much easier to solve.

I was thrilled to see Otey's article on skinning for .NET 1.x that uses .NET 2.0 skinning techniques.  I have discovered that Paul Wilson is probably the most up on Master Pages techniques.  I hope we will see frameworks similar to Wilson's for Skinning very soon.  If anyone has seen any other articles on Skinning that will help us all move toward the Whidbey solution, please let me know.