I have been working with my wife (a graphic designer) on a couple of web related projects at home, and I have realized that our concepts and worlds rarely overlap in any meaningful way. Even with her new focus on digital media it really takes a long time for us to grok each others worlds. Her universe rests within the Adobe Suite of products, mine within Visual Studio and never the twain shall meet.
Any meaningful discussion about user interface design within Visual Studio inevitably turns toward XAML and I have recently found two light weight XAML applications to start testing with. The first is XAMLPadX which is a marked step up from Notepad, however, being new to the world of XAML I need intellisense really badly. This caused me to turn to the loving arms of Kaxaml which provided a really clean install and intellisense that helped me navigate this new world. In addition if you are brave enough to install the beta version it also provides direct support for the subset of XAML that is Silverlight.
That was my first step, but I still needed an application that would allow my wife and I talk in the same XAML language without asking her to completely transform her workflow. This problem has apparently been solved for a while and I was relieved to find an Adobe Illustrator plug in created by Michael Swanson, that allows you to export XAML code for consumption in other applications.
My brief stint of XNA gaming may have to go on the back burner until we have this technology mastered!
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