Some great sounding jobs up for grabs at Redmond. It appears his soul is currently consumed with LINQ but based on his astute observations here I think maybe Paul should be applying for a decision making position on the Cider team!

The more that I play with WPF (my real job is still WinForms) the more I'm amazed at how unhelpful the Visual Studio WPF designer (Cider) is. I can't imagine that anyone actually uses it to layout form content. What's worse there are even third party tools that seem to do a much quicker and more robust job of previewing XAML markup "as you type".

I've started using Kaxaml in preference to Visual Studio for hand hacking WPF fragments - its just quicker and doesn't require so many restarts . What was really surprising is that it even does a better job of XAML Intellisense!

Yet there are things that I really yearn for in the WPF designer. Particularly a resource manager - at a simple level just a treeview showing all the resources defined in my application/project. Also a better way of visualizing data binding at a high level would be a great bonus.