This session is based on a big selling point that Microsoft has been driving home for Silverlight and WPF.  Designers and Developers who share the same source code can work on different aspects of the same project seamlessly without stepping on each other’s toes.  The session walked through two different development scenarios to demonstrate this point. 

The first demo was of a furniture design web site.  The developer built the back end that integrated with the database.  He hooked up simple tabs and list boxes to the database for dynamic content.  The Developer then picked up the XAML for the site, and styled each of the page elements to make a slick looking web site. 

The second demonstration was of a Silverlight application called the Deep Zoom Composer.  This is an application that helps users add images inside of images inside of images, like the Keynote demo from The Hard Rock Cafe.  In the same fashion, the developer hooked up the interface to implement all the heavy lifting, and the designer modified the XAML to style the application any way he chose. 

This kind of development and design interaction is extremely encouraging, and could cut down a significant amount of time we spend in construction and user acceptance testing of our external brand sites at BMS.  I am hoping that we work with an agency in the near future that is just as excited about trying out this technology.