Hello! Welcome to my new blog, Xaml hero! My name is Matt and I work as the WPF and Silverlight integrator at Xceed. With the arrival of new technologies that require artists and programmers to work together, came the need for a middle man: Me! Part of my job is to make sure that both parties understand each other and work towards the same goal. When we have technical group meetings the artist will often look at me and go "huh" and it's part of my job to make her understand some of the technical limitations she will be facing. My day to day job consists of taking the designs or prototypes the artists might have created and integrate them into our products. It can be new look for the column header in our grid or a new sample application for our Silverlight tools. I usually work directly in Visual Studio or a XAML-pad type of editor. I usually try to avoid using Blend as its XAML editor is still lacking.

As for our artist, she can use a wide variety of tools. She obviously does a lot in Blend; however, her mock ups can be static and come from illustrator. Once she is done, she'll ask me to "wpfize" them. She will also occasionally use Flash when her mock ups rely on elements being animated.

So there you have it, this is what I do at Xceed. I hope to bring you tips and samples on how to do neat things in both WPF and Silverlight whenever I get the chance.

Note that Catherine and I will be attending mix09! Look for us if you have questions about our products or just feel like chatting about them.