>WPF is a huge step backward in my opinion. Someday they may advance back to the days when visual development was useful, but what I see now is a giant leap back to the days of hand coding a visual interface a la dbaseIII - with enough @Say commands you eventually get what you need.

Hah, it is even WORSE than dbaseIII, because unless you use what they call "canvas" you can't really postion things accurately (i.e. absolutely.) Of course there is a "reason" for that, and the reason has its defenders and critics. I'm not sure where I am currently in that continuum.
>
>ASP.NET is also a huge leap backwards, but not quite as far. Some sort of excuse can be made for the web environment causing a lot of ASP.NET's handcoding requirements, but not enough IMHO.
>
>WPF is inexcusable AFAIK.

In its current iteration, yes, I would have to agree. However, VS 2010 will change things a lot in this area by finally introducing visual XAML design for the user interface. Too bad MS didn't let the WPF tools mature before dropping this elephant on the developer community.

Remember that old Gallo (?) ad: "We will serve no wine before it is time." MS would do well to heed that advise.