We plan to study aqueous dispersions of colloidal silica during drying. We shall prepare samples (1 mm thick, 40 mm long) with a gradient of water content by slowly evaporating them. We will focus the beam on those samples at points that straddle the liquid-solid transition and the cracking front. At each point we shall measure the water content, through the incoherent scattering of H2O, and the short range order of the particles, through the coherent scattering from silica. We will particularly investigate the anisotropy of the short range order, discovered in the last experiments made with D11.Through these measurements, we want to answer the following questions:Can we identify a sequence of events during the drying of the dispersion leading, from an initial liquid state to the final dry, solid state? How is the crossing of the cracking front linked to this sequence of events and what structural changes accompany the crossing of the cracking front? What is the influence of the drying geometry (comparison between evaporation from a cell open at one end and drying of a thin film.