Outformations

At the start of the summer, in service of my growing work with WPF and Silverlight, I decided to jump in and learn about Expression Blend in an online class at Foothill College with professor Cal Schrotenboer. Many of Cal’s classes are provided in an online format, which is great for busy developers and consultants with too little time for classroom instruction.

As I’ve been boning up on Blend, I stumbled across an interesting BLOG entry by Josh Smith on The Importance of Learning Expression Blend where he makes a really good point that developers will need to learn Blend even if they have no intention of using it to aid in bridging the communication gap between developers and designers who will live in Blend the way developers live in Visual Studio:

…Visual Designers think about WPF in a very different way than Developers. So different, in fact, that there is a very real potential for a communication barrier to arise between the development staff and the visual design team…it is easy to imagine working with a Visual Designer who does not have the development experience, and having trouble finding a common ground of shared concepts to discuss. The further away from “visual design” you go, the more murky the communication can become. For example, how do you discuss the proper way to create a declarative data binding with someone devoid of development experience?

Automation concepts (see Scott Hurlbert’s BLOG entry on Form and Function) should reduce this impedance mismatch if developers have UI automated tools that morph presentation as they add controls etc., but I contend that they still will need an understanding of what they are working with to be most effective. At some point, developers and designers need to collaborate, and hence they need to be able to communicate effectively.

My recent exploration of the Microsoft Expression Suite designers and IDE’s has exposed me to the potential of the platform, and I suspect that they will provide a level of reusability and leverage that has not been as available before with regard to the graphical aspects of LOB application development and the integration of designers and the developers working on the same project. We will be exploring exactly this intersection as we move forward with our prototyping and building out the WPF and Silverlight assests for our Agile Enterprise JumpStart in service of getting a handle on the potential productivity gains.