So, we're finished with the first part of the pre-conference, broken up in to very manageable 2-hour chunks across today. By which I mean, of course, that we got to eat lunch. The only comment I have about lunch is that it seemed to cater rather extensively to a vegetarian crowd...lot's of meatless choices.

So, on to Silverlight...

Our presenter is Jeff Prosise, an engaging speaker who appears to be quite knowledgeable regarding Silverlight. The funniest thing he's said so far has nothing to do with Silverlight, of course: he wants us to "grok" all this stuff. Being a Heinlein fan, I appreciated the reference.

Grok is a good term for Silverlight in any case. You have to fully immerse yourself into the Silverlight experience in order to really appreciate the technology, and, by doing so, you, as the observer, will become part of the observed, i.e., resistance is futile. Prosise calls it a "game changer," and I would find myself hard pressed to argue against that interpretation. A browser plug-in which doesn't require me to learn a new coding paradigm and in which I can basically fully utilize my hard-earned .Net experience.

I plan on using this space not to cover really technical aspects of things, unless they happen to be really cool, but more as a whiteboard on which I can pass on nuggets of the really interesting parts of the presentations that you can only get from being here.

For instance, you can check out the beta site for Microsoft's Silverlight enabled search engine at tafiti.com.

Note, the one other really interesting thing that Prosise pointed out, so far, concerns the "Core" Base Class Library (BCL). He specifically called out that, in the seven assemblies the comprise the so-called "CoreCLR," it's interesting to see System.Threading. You can use Silverlight to write a mult-threaded downloadable application! How cool is that?