I totally agree. It does not makes sense to have both apps merged in one when they are targeted to different people/roles. We have a phrase for that in Spanish: "Zapatero a tus zapatos" which means: "Shoemaker to your shoes" :P

i would love if visual studio did it all since most of us "devs" do it all

I think if VS 2010 has a decent functional designer for getting 80% of the UI implemented without an artist on hand, these complaints will go away. :)

That doesn't exist today, and hence the complaints IMHO.

I believe that it should be part of Team System for Designers and Team Suite just like a tester uses Visual Studio for testing.

I agree, I don´t give much for the WPF designer inside VS2008 or 20010. If Doing anything more complex than a black-and-white gradient, i Alt+Tab over to Blend. The smooth experience that comes with the fact taht both vs and blend senses when a file has been changed, makes the experience flawless! Writing wpf applications in VS is fine if you´re not gonna do any advanced designer-stuff, at least if youre not afraid of xaml :)

I like the way Adobe Flex handled this situation: they started with a pretty good WYSIWYG editor in their IDE (Flex Builder) and only later, they added a designer-centric tool called Flash Catalyst.

So you as a Flex dev has a full-featured designer in your IDE which is far from being true for WPF/Siliverlight (at least in VS 2008). MS started with the idea that the design should be done in a separate tool which makes sense from business perspective as MS will make more money out of it but as a dev, I strongly dislike this strategy. Sure, you can edit the XAML by hand or do some very basic stuff in Cider but the experience is nowhere near to the comfort you get in Flex Builder.

Your SQL example is wrong. The point is that managing users has nothing to do with writing queries for manipulating data. They are different TASKS.
Manipulating the UserInterface now involves switching between two applications, doing the same task: making sure the UI looks/works good.

Personally I'd like to see them combined. The Word / Excel example is about doing a small, discrete task (building a spreadsheet) inside a tool with the predominant purpose of writing documents. The problem with Blend / VS is that you're heavily dependent on both to achieve the one objective and because of clear advantages / deficiencies in each you wind up multitasking between the two. Perhaps it simply means the VS suite needs to be expanded to include a designer orientated product and another with the full suite.

For the start, we need VS's desing tool NOT to be in a read-only mode. It's really frustrating switching to Blend just to reposition/insert a simple control.

Blend should exist (it's a great tool for GUI), but VS design tool should not be a crap tool like in VS 2008.

Regards,
Al

I also strongly disagree:
1) Expression blend is not free.
2) Not every ISV could afford to hire pure UX designer, especially nowadays.
3) As someone mentioned before, one tool would be nice, because in practice developers do both design and development.
4) Starting from Vs2010 there is no much technological difference between Blend and VS.Net (both written in .Net using WPF), so why not combine?
5) At least basic designer features would be nice, so we developers do not feel abandoned by MS in favor of designers.

Your SQL Server example points to the contrary. I would argue that some Blend functionality be added to VS, just like SQL Server functionality in VS. For the more complex, then switch over to Blend.

I've got to disagree. As a designer first, developer second, I really wish that Blend was built into VS. Different roles doesn't have to mean different tools. There are plenty of software solutions for various tasks that support multiple roles. Two different tools in this case doesn't make a lot of sense in my opinion. Furthermore, it really hurts individuals such as myself, and small companies on a small budget, thereby generating resentment towards Microsoft.

What I would like is to be able to do some basic things in visual studio like clicking on an element and changing it's properties just like you can do in blend.

I don't need all the features of blend, just some basic stuff so I don't have to open blend just to do them. I might be wrong but I think that will be available in VS 2010.

I just asking myself, if ever use VS to build WPF/Silverlight application? Because from what I see you know from other work, not from yours ....
I will tell you something, now after more than 2 year, I don't bother to open an visual editor for xaml, but at beggining it was a pain in the ass to allign windows just from code.
And an other one, is not funny to hit F5 and navigate in your application just to see if all are well aligned, because design editor of VS just give you "Problem Loading ...."

I disagree with you on this one.

http://www.pchenry.com/Home/tabid/36/EntryID/23/Default.aspx

Al,

VS2010 will have a designer like WPF (though I am not positive that it will be a good designer yet).

Demigor,

Visual Studio isn't free either (unless you're using express) and not sure why it should be free (e.g. Adobe's tools). The justification for the tool has nothing to do with a separate UX designer. I think they are separate tasks.

Chris,

I disagree with you. You're getting a basic editor in VS, but I expect that most interesting layout will require Blend and I am ok with that.

Jason Grigely,

In principal, I understand what you mean but when you look at the cost of Blend and VS, the price point is so much lower than traditional design tools that I can't imagine its a real concern. In a small company the price of blend is probably less than a single day of your time.

i would love if visual studio did it all since most of us "devs" do it all

I see the need for 2 applications if one is going to be very designer oriented.

That being said, I think VS needs all the development capability and tools to build an application without being told to 'get a designer'.

A better question is : what is the role of a 'designer' vs. 'developer'. I know in my role I design and develop, I'm a developer. I don't have a xaml designer expert on my team :)

So, I do my development for .NET technologies in Visual Studio and prefer to stay in that IDE, I don't expect two IDE's.

My anology to your word vs. excel analogy is "Visual Studio is my Office install that includes support for VB.NET, C#, ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight, Designer support" in the same light - your comparing VS to Word and Blend to Excel, whereas I see this as buying Office but MS deciding to sell Excel separately.

(you asked - lol)

I say ditch the VS one completely. It provides exactly 0 value other than having a button that causes me to watch the donut for a few seconds while it tries (and usually fails) to load. They should spend time on something more useful like providing a nice way to edit the values of the 'active' element in the xaml (similar to what it does now in design view's properties)

Visual Studio should have every feature Blend has. If MS feels the need to sell Blend as a separate tool, it should just be a subset of the VS features with a few tweaks.

Think of the Photoshop/Lightroom model. Photoshop can do everything Lightroom can in terms of editing, but Lightroom is a more efficient at certain tasks (though not more powerful). VS/Blend should have a similar relationship.

They should be combined and the designers should use a watered down version of VS that hides all the extra options.

Redesigning blends from the ground up means that developers have to relearn how to do simple things like how to drag a control onto the designer (different in blend and vs).

Everyone on my team is afraid to use blend due to the learning curve.

I have worked with winforms for a long time and have worked with Silverlight for the last year. The transition has been has felt like jumping 10 years back in RAD technology. We had to shut off the visual designer in Visual Studio, because it was so slow and wouldn't always work. We often have to look at the XAML in VS and Blend when we have errors because they catch different errors. Blend won't compile a large project. It doesn't work with source safe and causes problems with files not getting checked in if you don't religously follow the "Source Safe Rituals". Why has Microsoft taken a great product and made two mediocre products? (Money?)

Here is my comment.. Simple as that... I like how everyone here is throwing around Designer vs Developer... Well I think you are a little off here. A developer is technically someone who does it all, a designer just designs. Albeit, he may do it all when coming in part to designing in nature but it has nothing to do with the real other term which is programming. A programmer builds the required engines, systems and functions (classes and more) to handle that which the designer has built up. When looking at it correctly one could say that VS is more programmatic and blend is more designer centric. A developer works with both the programmer and the designer to fill in what he needs. If you are the developer, designer and the programmer, well you are going to have to suffer through 2 programs. When it comes down to it, all programs have a general purpose. (Not saying that Microsoft has made 2 really good programs here, but I've never had a problem with either one of them)