So, WPF is the technology that is finally going to realize the vision of allowing developers and designers to work on the same project, using the same assets, at the same time, and have everyone be happy.  I posted quite a ways back that WPF was cool, and posted pictures of my first two efforts as evidence that WPF will also make it easy for developers to do ridiculous and confusing things.  In my "spare time" at work, which right now means "When I get sick of the things I need to be doing"  I am actually working in WPF, with Orcas and the Expression Blend September preview, on a real application that is going into production next year, with assets supplied by real designers.  Real designers with talent, who are used to specific non-MSFT tools, who are windows-hating Mac users who wouldn't fire up Expression Blend if it came with a free puppy and a pound of gold.  It's very early yet, but I think it's going to work because tools are appearing that will export Adobe Illustrator to XAML, and Expression Design can import vector graphics from Illustrator files.  If WPF and Silverlight gain enough traction is it too much to hope that Illustrator (on the Mac, no less) will be able to understand my VS2008 solution file?  Is it too much furthur to hope that maybe a VSS or Subversion plug-in could be written to let them check the assets right in to my source control?

In the past we've often had one of two situations:

1. The designer jumps into the asp/jsp/<yourTemplateEngineHere> code to design it up.  Code is accidentally broken, or the designer is unsure of which parts can be edited.
2. You receive a .TIFF or .PNG graphic depicting insane things and the unenviable task of "Turn this into a web page or windows form".  Hilarity ensues.

If we can get to the point where the UI with insane things going on is an Illustrator file that you import and it "just works", we will have accomplished something.  If the black turtleneck Mac using artist can just check in the XAML skin for my programs, life will be good.