I agree that devs can and should pick up visual design skills even if (especially if) these skills don’t come naturally.

One of the great trends in recent software has been the facilitation of visual creativity by the graphically unskilled. Think of what we routinely do today to our photographs … cropping, dodging, color balancing, artifact removing. These skills … even the awareness of them … was way beyond our ken until these products came alont. What would have taken a darkroom expert days to accomplish we plunkers can do in seconds. That doesn’t make us artists … it just means we can achieve results that were previously impossible unless we were artists.

Blend is the developer’s friend for similar reasons.

And I think it is wonderful that Herding Code will do a show where the designer’s voice is heard.

However, speaking for myself, I am as convinced now as I was then that code has no place in the output of the visual design tools.

XAML is not the kind of thing that makes for a good programming language (understatement) and visual designers do not become good programmers by virtue of the tools (anymore than tools make good artists of us programmers).

I see value in bringing visual design tools to developers. I see none in turning visual design tools into programming tools.

If designers want to program, they should learn our tools, our concepts, our practices, our disciplines … just as we developers, if we wish to learn visual design, should learn designer tools, concepts, practices and disciplines.

Note that I am not suggesting we are different species nor am I suggesting that, rare as it is, designers can’t program and programmers can’t design.

I am saying that these are different modalities with distinct demands and that we should not pretend that we can simply tool our way out of these differences.

Also, on the JQueryish topic for WPF… the closest thing that I’ve seen is Bling. Thoughts on this??

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Expert-to-Expert-Inside-Bling-A-C-based-library-to-simplify-WPF-programming/

A lot of the discussions here were directly pertinent to work that I am currently doing. I am really looking forward to Jeremy’s book!

I was especially interested in Jeremy’s comments on how MVVM doesn’t always satisfy every solution alone. I really like the MVVM pattern but there are many times that you need something else … for instance using Supervising controller.

I also found it interesting to hear about how Caliburn composites the View Models (from last weeks show). I will definitely need to look into this a bit more. It does sound a bit CAB-ish but I think Rob did a great job at explaining how he uses this and doesn’t use it to navigate way up and down the VM hierarchy. I have found that many times I need the VM to be composited and I only would need to talk one up or down in the VM hierarchy (as Rob said).

All in all great stuff…thanks to everyone for such a informative and thought provoing conversation.

I agree we certainly didn’t cover the designer angle to any length, I mean we’re all developers :-). No seriously this was a dev-centric talk for sure. I don’t think we were saying (I know i wasn’t) that we expect designers to be developers or vice versa. What we were talking about is the tradeoffs from the dev perspective.

Glenn

Not once did i hear from the participants of a willingness to take on designer skills. That is the main problem i believe, you want designers to pick up developer skills well the uncomfortable truth is that in the future the exact opposite will need to happen. Developers need to pick up design skills!!!

I think a follow up podcast with some people from the design world needs to happen.