In your company, who does design and develop style, layout in xaml, Designers? or Developers?
Are there enough designers who are able to deal with xaml or blend?
Are they willing to touch Blend?
In my company, Developers do all those jobs except making images.
I am so confused nowadays if this is right direction.
Give me a advice.
I'm the developer and the designer too. I think developers love blend, because it is very simple, and it is easy to create attractive interfaces (the greatest programming/design IDE i've ever seen). But i never met a silverlight designer, who is not a developer too. I think it will be happens in the future, that completely separate design and coding, but not now. Maybe in a new programmer generation :). I think its very important for a silverlight/wpf designer, to know, how this new binding concept works. Programmers knows it already, so it is much easier to do coding and design for yourself, than ask a designer to learn blend and the silverlight/wpf things, because they think it's coding...but blend is simply clicking...but you must learn it, and you must understand xaml hierarchy and syntax and everything...
So i think they must go to a training class, with developers, and learn the new things together. Than they can separate things. Designers are much lazier than developers, but they need learn new things too.
I think i'm lucky, i love design & coding too.
Silverlight is certainly gaining momentum, but in the design industry it is a relative newcomer.
I personally know of only one UK company that actually uses specialist "XAML designers" side-by-side with their Silverlight coders (but the results there are not anything special). I'm sure there are more but it says something that I have not seen many.
At my current major client, there is a real need for GUI design work, but that will be done by traditional designers (e.g. in Photoshop) and although I am a hard-core coder by trade I will likely be the one that "Blends it". Luckily I really like working with Blend (and Sketchflow). I rate it highly for coders, as it does so much more than the VS 2010 editor, and I tend to do only XAML tweaks in VS 2010 (and all my code of course).
Designers are not lazier. They have a different skill set - one that I do not have myself and have come to admire. The really good ones can produce amazing results, but even the worst ones are much better at pure design than me. I do not expect non-coders to sit at a desk for 12 hours straight solving problems like we are prone to do (but non-coders usually have better social lives) :)