Expression Blend's SketchFlow Syncs Up Silverlight Designers and Developers

With Expression Blend 3's SketchFlow, Silverlight developers can start coding while designers are prototyping

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Shawn Wildermuth

DevProConnections

InstantDoc ID #125049

Designers aren't evil. Let me say that again for those developers out there: Designers aren't evil. Their job is hard just like yours. The problem is that designers and developers haven't had the tools to work together before. The rough answer to that problem for the past few years in Silverlight has been Microsoft Expression Blend. But that's only been part of the story.

A design starts with an idea that needs to be vetted, coaxed, and changed. Often it starts as something as simple as a cocktail napkin drawing. More drawings get passed around, and the idea takes shape. During this process of molding the idea, the drawings stay rough. Eventually the idea is agreed upon and some polish is added.

In traditional web development, at this point in the process, polished versions of the design are handed over to developers. What complicates this process is that the designs aren't complete; they're continually being massaged and fiddled with. These changes can be painful for developers as such changes tend to be interruptive and minor.

In Silverlight and more specifically, Blend, this story has been better. Once the polished designs were brought into Blend, changes could happen while the developers continued to work on the code. But the polished hand-over of the design continued to be a blocking point. Developers typically couldn't get involved until the design settled down. Or at least that's the way it used to work. With SketchFlow that can change, and I'll explain how.

What Is SketchFlow?
SketchFlow is a technology that ships as part of Microsoft Expression Blend 3. Blend has traditionally been a product for creating UIs for Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) or Silverlight. SketchFlow extends Blend to allow UI design to start from the earliest parts of a design. SketchFlow lets you build on and polish a design through the entire development process. SketchFlow is not about development; instead it's about the design process. This specifically impacts you, as developers.

An Example
For example, let's take a simple quiz application I'm working on. Although I'm not a designer, I wanted to start out with a simple sketch and move onto a finished product. As Figure 1 shows, I sketched together a quick opening page to my Silverlight quiz-making application.