>>VS.NET 2010 (slated for release sometime next year) ***finally*** introduces visual design for XAML, but it still leaves a whole bunch of pain in the codebehind. While I don't fancy myself as a luddite, at times like this I seriously wonder if we are actually making much progress here with MS's programming paradigm. To illustrate the point, I have posted below code (XAML and C# codebehind) that is necessary to get a simple data query screen up and running. You don't need to try to understand the code, just take a look at the volume and the complexity, keeping in mind that the Ideablade framework I used with this application takes care of a whole lot of the heavy lifting to get data access going -- without it I would have had to write a whole bunch of additional complex code to create a data server between Silverlight and the data source. This simple screen has a few buttons to connect to the backend SQL server database, log in, fetch and filter data, save changes, and log out. It also has a grid displaying the results of the data fetches. Call me lazy, but I believe there has to be an easier way to do this.
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>>And here (drum roll) is the code I had to write by hand (albeit with the help of Intellisense):
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>There is a much easier way. Take a look at the WCF RIA (the old .Net RIA Services) Services which allows you to do all of that and hook up your data editing form declaratively in about 40 lines of xaml.

Thanks --

WCF RIA has not been released to manufacturing yet, so I can't use it in any production environment or even serious development. RIA is slated for release sometime next year, and between today and then a lot can happen to the API that can break my code. Be that as it may, it still seems that .NET is playing catch-up with stuff MS has had for years, even decades already.

Hopefully RIA will address many if not all of the current pain points when it finally arrives. With new features coming in VS 2010 and Silverlight 4, it could well be that programmer productivity will increase significantly in the future. In the meanwhile, hope springs but the pain remains.