Came across DesignersLove.Net via a post over on Chris Anderson’s blog. It’s just getting started, but I’m already sending the link out to all of my designer friends. I have been trying to preach to them about the separation of content and behavior in Avalon and they really seem to love the idea of maintaining complete control over their content. I think the harder part is teaching the developers how to design controls so that their behavior is completely separated from the content. Microsoft has coined the term “look-less controls” to describe this pattern.
It’s a challenge to design controls this way because you need some kind of visual representation for your control by default, but you also need to consider that someone may completely replace your control’s visual tree and it still needs to maintain the same behavior regardless.
Interesting times lie ahead for both designers and developers…