Anthony Handley & Rockford Lhotka presented a session on Real-World lessons learned from their project with WPF and Silverlight. You might know Rocky from the CSLA .NET framework. Overall, they said the process was definitely more fluid working in physically different parts of the country over their traditional methods.
Designer Perspective
- The designer will need to learn the basics of Visual Studio. They can't work purely in Expression.
- Design was originally done in PhotoShop using layers and saved out to PNGs to be imported into Blend
- Blend has brought over much of the terminology that other tools use to
help with the transition making designers comfortable working in it.
- No TFS support in Blend
and many designers may never have used source control before - Any changes made to the backend code requires the designer to go into Visual Studio to recompile so Blend can use the latest project assemblies.
Developer perspective
- You will use data binding, get over any stigma about it from VB days
- Visual Studio designer is not the same as the designer in Blend, they do not use the same engine and you probably won't see the same visual representation.
- You will end up typing, copy/paste and modifying XAML directly. For example, you cannot add subclassed controls from the designer directly.
- Rocky was able to add code to the XAML and the designer (Anthony) could still make visual changes in Blend without knowing about code
- There is no intellisense on the binding expressions
- The designer must agree not to change the names of controls otherwise existing binding and events will fail. There is no way to "lock" them so Blend can't change them.
Overall this was a good informative session without any big surprises. The good news was really about how easy Blend is to adopt for existing designers and that Blend copes well with the changes made by developers to the XAML it produces and consumes. This gets us closer to the ideal full round-trip solution which allows designers to continue to contribute throughout a project without significantly increasing the overhead of developer re-work, however it highlights that the developer experience is much more low-level than Microsoft would lead you to believe and the designer needs to be willing to learn a little more about development.