Check out Ryan Stewart’s post on the importance of developer and designer workflow when it comes to building RIAs and almost any other applications.
He brought up many great points, like how Apple’s focus on both presentation and functionality have contributed to its success throughout these years, and how we’re going to need both the designer’s creativity and the developers code, to come out with something successful.
Collaboration between both designer and developer is essential, and there is a need for a framework or technology to deal with this tricky, tricky issue. The first technology that came to mind, that currently has the best method of dealing with this issue of collaboration, is no other than – WPF.
The workflow of developing both WPF applications and Silverlight applications are pretty similar, where the developer will be using Visual Studio to pump code into the application, and the designer using Expression Blend to craft the user interface.
Where both parties would be dealing with the same project, the same format (XAML), that could be opened in both Visual Studio and Expression Blend, development and design could be done rapidly, and integration would be seamless, and the completed project would include both the creativity of the designer for better user experience and the functional capabilities provided by the developer.
Still, the workflow’s concept might seem a little too elusive, and if you would like to find out more, check out this video from Channel 9, Real World WPF : Designers and Developers working together?!
In the video, Martin Grayson and Paul Tallett from the UK MCS User Experience team talks about their experience working on real world WPF applications and how designers and developers worked together, they’ve also explained in detail the various workflows they have tried out, weighing their ups and downs and their opinion on which is the best workflow for developing WPF applications.
Well, ain’t WPF just cool! 
