I know, all programmers are not designers. But c’mon, you can’t look at your internal business app and think it looks pretty. Or that it’s very usable. In fact, it probably has no flashy graphics, unless you use controls like Infragistics.

If we haven’t learned enough from programming, maybe we can learn something from the recession. You have to set yourself apart from the pack. Everyone can write a windows form app. But can you make it pretty? Can you make features discoverable? Can you make it not cluttered with buttons, and have a 120 page manual to explain to users how to use your product? (Not that anyone likes writing documentation, especially catering to users).

If you bring these skills to the table, it doesn’t matter if you can use linq-to-xml. Everyone can use that…