So how does a developer cope with this situation? Well you could take art and design lessons, and that certainly wouldn’t hurt if you have interest and motivation. In the past, the typical developer skill set only called for functional things and the term “experience” was only called upon when users started to pound tables in frustration over a bug or missing feature. This combination of talents is hard to come by, which means that most people working with WPF/SL are developers who are now tasked with creating something beautiful that is also considered an “exciting experience”. WPF and Silverlight make the problem particularly pronounced because they require development skills as well as graphical skills. It therefore takes expert knowledge to fall on the desirable end of that range. The root problem is not unique to WPF and Silverlight, but it is shared by many powerful technologies: They enable an extremely wide range of possibilities, both in the positive and the negative. You can find very polished applications while others come across as complete messes with awful artwork and intrusive animations that make you want to reach for sea-sickness medications. You can see the same thing in production applications. But then at the same event, you could sit in another session that covers WPF and/or Silverlight and see an absolutely sound presentation (technically), but it looks like a 3-year old just slapped it together (no offense meant to all the 3-year olds reading this article). One can watch a demo at a keynote of a major event such as PDC and see some of the most amazing user interfaces ever conceived. One of the things about WPF and Silverlight that amazes me is the polarity in quality produced. But fear not! With Expression Blend, Microsoft provides a great tool to create such UIs, and even developers with no graphical talents whatsoever can learn a few techniques that allow for better looking applications. However, in general, developers aren’t graphical designers, leaving most developers wondering how to cope with this new world of designed interfaces and polished user experiences. With WPF and Silverlight, Microsoft provides both Windows and Web developers with powerful technologies to create rich, professional, and exciting user experiences.
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