Anyone managed to use Expression Blend for productive Designer & Developer Collaboration?

Question

I'm an MVC fan from way back and used Maverick.Net for my web sites long before ASP.Net MVC came along. One of the utopian goals I had for MVC was that I'd be able to break the horrible practice of designers doing their thing in Dreamweaver and emailing over the HTML to the developer who had to spend time fiddling around with it to massage it into a proper application.

When Expression Blend first arrived on the scene I was straight on to my graphic designer to switch from Dreamweaver to it. Working on the same project and source files, her in Expression Blend and me in Visual Studio .Net, would mean I as the developer would never have to worry about layout, colours, styles etc. etc. ever again.

Unfortunately the dream did not last long and in a very short time it was back to me getting grpahics, HMTL snippets etc. via email. Has anyone managed to live the dream with the Expression suite of products and Visual Studio .Net and have a productive collaboration between designers and developers?

Answer 1

I guess the answer is no :(.

Unfortunately Microsoft looks like it's got a long battle to bring designers across to the Expression products. In my experience designers are even more particular about their tools than programmers! I had a very talented and smart graphic designer working for me at one stage and convinced her to use Expression Blend so she could stylise my Silverlight apps. Despite giving it a decent attempt she never felt comfortable and resorted back to Dreamweaver which meant transferring mockup images, colour codes and stylesheets to me who then had to apply them in Expression Blend.