How can a programmer work with a web designer using Silverlight?

Question

we want to develop an application for silver light. I'm a programmer. Management wants to improve the Userinterface, so they want the web designer to join the development. I am using VS2010 for application development. I know that there is a tool on which the blend expression is called, which is intended for the designer. how can we work together. What is the best practice with this two-man team.

Thanks.

David

Answer 1

We hired an external design agency to help with the design of the large Lights Silverlight application. I would suggest starting the process with paper and pencil, collecting ideas, looking and feeling, etc. Also think about who your target audience is, we created Personas that represent specific types of users, if your users have a problem with the final user interface / UX is bad.

Then we let the designer create parts of the user interface in combination with nothing (or maybe just a little to test the idea or prove the point).

At the same time, you can consider / develop the overall flow of the application (screens / views / subviews) and run your infrastructure (that is, which MVVM suits you, how to cut out views using controls or usercontrols, etc.).

Bringing visual images along with code that we then ran at intervals. It turned out to be an iterative process, but with different perspectives as the project progressed, it helped smooth out the problems they presented.

Definitely talk through the process before starting.

A bit of a tramp, but I hope this helps.

Answer 2

I don’t know about the best practices of your situation, but Expression Blend can open the same project and solution files as Visual Studio, so you can work with the same code base. Whether you will step on each other's fingers or not, this is another story. Perhaps someone else will have more ideas on how the developer / designer speaker works when working with Silverlight applications.

Answer 3

I would start by understanding the MVVM pattern.

With the MVVM template, you can create two separate ViewModels for each view. One of them can be real with good functionality, and the second - for the designer - to work with fake data in Blend. Then you can easily work with the functional part of the application ( ViewMode and Model ), and the designer will customize the GUI ( View ).

You can test in ServiceLocator if you are in Blend or at runtime and provide the appropriate ViewModel.

One of the easiest (and good for working in Bled) MVVMs is: MVVM Light Toolkit