Developer Designer Workflow

There have been some interesting articles about Cider in the news lately:

• Microsoft Brews Some Cider
• Microsoft's Expression Could Lure Corporate Defections From Mac
• Beyond the Mists of Avalon

One of the interesting things that a couple of these articles go into is something we've seen some of our customers ask about and that is the designer developer workflow.  There are a lot of questions centered around:

• "How do I take my UI in Sparkle or drawing in Acrylic and use it in Cider?"
• "Where is the best place to implement functionality X, in Sparkle or in Cider?"
• "Can I switch back and forth between Sparkle and Cider when developing my UI without losing changes?"

As it turns out, these kinds of designer/developer workflow questions are very similar to the kinds of questions we are discussing internally with the sparkle team.  We have a lot of functionality already and are in the midst of implementing new features and tweaking existing ones in both products.  As a part of this process we’re working to define the best practices for working with both tools and we will be sharing them with you as soon as we can.

One thing that is certain is that we are going to avoid data loss when switching between designers.  That, as well having MSBuild always build the output of both designers, are central to the developer/designer workflow.

Our main scenarios for developer/designer workflow involve (but are not limited to):

• The designer creates a style library in Sparkle -> the developer consumes it
• The designer creates a UI -> the developer writes the code behind
• The developer creates a UI -> the designer reworks it

What developer designer workflow scenarios are important to you?