About the Whidbey demo's thing...
Yesterday I blogged about a new group I've created to post small demo's and prototypes of ASP.NET Whidbey projects:
http://weblogs.asp.net/dneimke/archive/2005/01/27/361426.aspx
I think that learning something such as ASP.NET Whidbey is a very incremental process. You try something until you get it right and then as you look up you get to see exactly how much more stuff you don't understand.
I'm presently working through a scenario like this with WebParts and the PortalFramework so, most of my little demo's will be related to what I'm learning there. My end goal is to see whether those 2 things together can be used to build a rudimentary plug-in Framework.
While I'm learning that it will be good to get side-tracked by others who post their little snippets on other parts of the new technology: Custom Builders, Caching, Theming, Whacky Validation scenario's etc. and, in seeing their stuff it might just open a little gate for me to make a breakthrough in the stuff that I'm tackling.
So, if you have a folder named C:\WhidbeyTests\... and it's filling up with little tests I'm interested :-)