This is my fist post from PDC 2009. I attended an all day workshop on Silverlight. It was presented by a couple of Brits who came here to teach me! Overall the presentation was pretty good.
The first session was just a general overview of Silverlight presented by Ian Griffiths. This was a little more basic than I needed it to be. He was pretty entertaining so it wasn’t too bad having to sit through the standard introduction. This was probably a pretty good intro for some of the audience based on the question that were asked. There were a few people that had no clue what Silverlight was. This session hopefully helped them.
The second session of the day centered around how to get data into a Silverlight application again presented by Ian. Again there was a lot of information that I had new. The good part of this session was seeing different methods for getting the data in. I knew the capability but had not seen demos of the different method. I saw some new things but nothing that is going to change anything I have done.
The third session on Model-View-View Model (MVVM) which was presented by Rich Griffin, was the best of the day in my opinion. I had a vague understanding of what MVVM was and had never seen it in action. This session would have been good to see a couple a months ago. This would have been great to implement in the project I been working. The good news is that I am not too far off from this pattern so refactoring should not be too hard to do. I would recommend this pattern to anyone starting any Silverlight application.
The final session of the day was centered around Designer/Developer Workflow. Rich also presented this. This was a great session because there were few slides and the whole demo was done in Expression Blend. I have used Blend to some of the UI project at work but I have only scratched the surface of the capabilities of this tool. This demo showed me the power that is available within Blend.
Over all the day was pretty good. There are rumors of good things to come in the next few days…Stay tune for updates.
Update: Added link to some code and added so tags
Dave's Two Cents 
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