>>I can't stand it! lol. I have invested massive amounts of time learning C#.NET, and already it's becoming yesterday's news. Now Silverlight and WPF are the flavors of the day.
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>WPF/Silverlight both rely heavily on C#. C# (VB.Net) is the foundation from which these technologies spring. The UI (XAML) is just the presentation stuff, all the rest of the plumbing requires c#.

Right-O! XAML is really the biggest fly in the ointment, but most of the rest of it looks "eerily familiar." And even with XAML, if you use Blend you are way ahead of the game right out the gate.

Silverlight and WPF just sort of build on top of what already is in .NET. Gotta say, though, that for example getting a grid to populate with, say, SQL Server data and update detail information from the currently selected grid row in Silverlight takes a bit of doing. Furthermore, as I understand it Silverlight employs a 2-tier data access schema -- if you want n-tiers, you probably have to use a third party framework. Same with requests that rely on previous requests, because of the asynchronous nature of Silverlight's native data access.

I've been messing around with Devforce's commercial Ideablade framework for Silverlight (I have used their Winform and Web frameworks before, so I sort of understand how they "think") and it seems to do a lot of the mundane (and sometimes even profane) stuff that you have to do to move data in and out of your Silverlight applications. Then again, I am a bit like a babe in the woods with all this newfangled stuff (XAML being one of them, WPF another,) so I'll probably know a lot more in a few weeks/months once I get my first pure Silverlight app up and running.

You just can't stand still, as nice and comfy as it would be. You must evolve and keep learning. Learn or be eaten.