I hate it when a designer touches XAML..

I’ve meet with a few die-hard Silverlight developers in my time and some feedback I get at times is how designers produce bad XAML.

“..I hate it when a designer touches XAML..” – oh? why?

My first thought was, “bad XAML?” how on earth can a designer produce bad XAML. *confused look*

After digging I find out that one of the pet hates is that the designer doesn’t name their controls properly or that they’ll use a rectangle instead of a grid/canvas etc to visually represent the UI.

I then hold up my hand and say “stop”.

Here’s the lesson folks.

Expression Studio and Visual Studio allow you to collaborate with designers and developers. We’ve made it so you majority of the time never need to look at how the tools generate XAML as it just works. That all being said, it ENABLES you to work together, you still need to WORK together.

Meaning, setup rules of engagement with one another. Tell your designer that you need certain User Controls for certain contexts. You expect a clear naming convention and so on. Let the designer execute their creative vision and don’t impose too many rules on them as you could starve the process of creative flow but agree on how the pipeline will work UPFRONT.

Don’t expect the tools to automate your communication between developer and designer, as to do that would be a one neat trick.

Word for today: Communication.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 25, 2009
  The main problem is that separting design from development is the goal of Xaml but this goal is still not reached... I had no difficulties explaining Expression Design to my designers, I had and still have a lot of difficulties training them to Blend. Not because Blend is hard to understand, it isn't, but because to template a simple control you must be an IT Engineer ! I know and I feel the constraints behind a slider or a listbox and all its subparts and how it has been built and why the control is needing all those parts in this specific order, but no designer understand this. And you actually can't create a full template (try a listbox and some other controls) just knowing how to draw mickey mouse. You MUST be an ITE. That's the problem. So the problem we're all currently facing is that the "design part" can't be achieve by just a designer. It must be IT Engineer having artistic skill. And it is very hard to hire such people... MS must work a lot today to really separate technical control knwoledge from design job. You were saying that developers must work with designers, explaining things, listing constraints, and so on. I think we will not be able to fill the gap just assigning an IT engineer to each designer... The problem is not communication, it is XAML itself and the overall process under WPF that needs too much IT skill for a simple designer...

• Anonymous
  January 25, 2009
  nice post, a good portion of my workshop at mix is related to just this idea.

• Anonymous
  January 26, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  February 04, 2009
  @Nick Harewood  I don't think the industry is undeveloped or skills are rare, it's merely many people don't know how to get find each other.  There are many great design firms and there are great development firms, large and small.  They just haven't met each other.

• Anonymous
  February 18, 2009
  The comment has been removed