Hi Folks, I've been working with Kirsten on her new WPF app, and I'm the source of her concern about WPF productivity, after she watched me composing moderately complex screens by editing the XAML in VS2010. I posted about this last year, but only received replies about "persist and you'll get there and like it" types of responses.
I've now been writing Silverlight and WPF intermittently for a few years now and I have never found a more productive way of creating reasonably complex screens other than by manually editing the XAML, and if it weren't for the intellisense I would probably never have started. I hope you'll agree that the VS2010 design surface is utterly useless for composing XAML using the toolbox, if anyone disagrees, let me know. Any attempts to drop tools onto the designer produce bizarre unexpected results, and you'll be lucky if they even drop where you expect. For that reason I became quite proficient in editing XAML directly. Then Blend 2, 3 and 4 came out. I didn't actually legally own Blend until I recently paid $3750 for a two year premium MSDN subscription which include Office and Blend suites. I have never like Blend. It has a totally different "feel" with new shortcuts, docking behaviour, colours and UI hints, it's also "cluttered", confusing, non-intuitive and worst of all I would have it open on one screen and VS2010 on the other, getting dizzy looking back and forth. Blend gives me the stinkin' sh*ts. As a result of all this, I claim it can take me from 5 to 20 times longer to write a WPF app UI compared to a WinForms UI. That results in a lot of time, money and frustration wasted. I know that WinForms and WPF have totally different underlying encoding schemes, so it's simply the design experience that leaves me bewildered and leads me to ask this: Do others out there have day-to-day techniques for efficiently composing complex WPF UIs? How are you doing it? Is there a friendly toolbox-drop and design technique that Kirsten (and me) are used to? Any specific advice would be most welcome. I feel I must be missing out on some productivity "trick". Perhaps it's because I hate Blend that I'm in this rut. Greg Ps. I have skipped mentioning other irritations like styling (which requires someone with special skills and Blend) or adding animations and triggers which bloat the XAML to huge sizes making them nearly impossible to edit by hand. I also ignored the sheer complexity of the XAML and how hard it is to remember something like the syntax and nest of tags required to make a ListBox item template (for example). I find I'm continuously looking up XAML samples on the web and pasting them in. I also find I'm writing converters all the time to get stuff appearing as I need.
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