On Saturday, March 29, I attended the Atlanta Code Camp.  Last year I skipped around to get an overview of a lot of different areas.  This year I decided to concentrate on one of the eight offered tracks, Silverlight.  I wanted a deeper knowledge of one subject, and I haven't got around to reading the Silverlight 1.0 book I bought a few months ago.

The following is a summary of my notes from the sessions.  Any errors are probably mine during transcription.  Some parts will be fragmented and maybe only make sense to me.

1. Introducing Silverlight 2.0
	Corey Schuman - http://simplesilverlight.wordpress.com
	What’s new in Silverlight 2.0: Controls, uses of Silverlight, animations, connection to data sources.
	Version 2.0 can consume web services, and importantly ALL calls are asynchronous. The XAP file is like the Flash SWF file, it is a zip file of all the DLL's. In IIS must have XAP registered as a MIME type. The BCL is the Base Class Library.  The isolated store will hold up to 1 MB, and you can ask the end user for more up to 10 MB. The Silverlight List Box can be used as a Control Container.  For beginners, Corey suggested the introductory series by Scott Guthrie which can be found here.
2. Using Blend 2.0 for Silverlight / Consuming Data with Silverlight 2.0
	Shawn Wildermuth- http://adoguy.com
	An overview of Expression Blend 2.5 for Silverlight developers was given by Shawn.  The current beta release has several bugs, it will crash on you.  One nice thing is that Visual Studio 2008 and Blend use the same solution file. Shawn continued with an overview of consuming data with Silverlight.  There is no ADO in Silverlight, but there is full support for LINQ to Objects and LINQ to XML.  Beware that LINQ projections have a bug. The XDocument and the XMLDocument classes are available.  XMLDocument has a smaller footprint, but does not support XPath.  You can use XMLReader but it is difficult to work with.  Shaped results should be changed to simple types. Silverlight tries to restrict you to calling a web service in the current domain only.  To complicate things, the client configuration is not read in the 2.0 Beta. As stated in the first session, the asynchronous is used with Binding, EndPoint, and Proxy Classes.  If you are using the Visual Studio developer, a fixed port number is useful, as are observable collections.  The state service SOAP client uses a Sync call and completed Events.  When using WCF, you have a lot more configuration items to set.  The query-able end points should develop shape data themselves. ADO.Net Data Services, AKA Astoria, exposes data over HTTP(S) using URI syntax and a REST interface.  The LINQ support hides REST, it is not available now but there is a Silverlight 2 library in the works.  The REST functions Get, Post, Put, and Delete do match the primary database CRUD functions. For security cross domain calls  require permission.  The policy file "accesspolicy.xml" must be in the root of the server.  Usually this is an all or nothing situation, but you can use existing policies to allow and grant. Only TCP sockets are allowed and are based on the platform (i.e. Winsock).  You can only connect to the local machine by "localhost".  The Beta 1 has only socket testing only, and on a small port range. In the final session Shawn gave a brief overview of the DeepZoom composer and how to use a DeepZoom image in your Silverlight 2 application.
	Desc
3. Real World Silverlight Tips and Tricks
	Steve Porter and Keith Rome - http://www.wintellect.com/cs/blogs/sporter, http://www.mindfusioncorp.com/weblog
	Various Silverlight 1.0 and 2.0 tips and tricks that have been used on real projects.
	Steve and Keith presented several interesting items in their presentation, among them was the technique of using a storyboard as a timer.  The source code for these may be found at the authors weblogs.