WPF – working with designers – will it work?

One of the main advantages of WPF is that you can write all the backend code and then shunt the design work to a professional designer – you know – one of those guys who thinks that Cyan and Magenta just don’t go together.

I’ve been knocking up a couple of WPF apps in the past month or so and have some very basic Windows pieced together. The app basically works, and now I’m looking at passing the XAML to the designer to get her to make it look good. It’s kind of exciting – I’m really interested to see what she’ll come up with – given free reign and a package hopefully allowing her to do what she wants.

She’ll be predominantly using Expression Blend (and presumably Photoshop) to do the design work. I guess my only reservation is that designing an application where you can use timelines etc is a different kettle of fish to a website, and I hope that we can work together to put some of the cooler WPF stuff into the app.

The other concern is how it will work – should I just give her a document detailing the data that needs to be represented and let her make the window up as she likes, or should I knock up a basic window and then she can just rip it apart etc (again as she likes)…??

I’ll try to blog more when I know how the process is going to go and keep up to date on how it is actually going.

Here’s going forward optimistically!