>>>- I know you're not a big fan of WinForms, but I agree with your views on WPF. Yes, you can build some rather cool things with WPF, but from developer efficiency I still say it's a step backwards. What is hard to understand is this: WCF came out at the same time as WPF (3.0 framework). WCF has been, IMO, a well-conceived piece of technology from day 1. WPF, by comparison, has been more convoluted.
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>>Nah, WCF is just as convoluted. It ships with crappy default values. I understand WHY - it's meant to limit the attack surface for things like denial of service - but they basically mean the first time you write an app using WCF it will work during testing but immediately fail as soon as you put it into production. The error messages suck. The tracing app. is nice but it's kind of hidden - it needs to be much more readily accessible. Configuring via the XML file is really clumsy.
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>>I really like the data binding model in WPF, but the XAML code is weird. There are definitely things in it that feel like they changed the standard way of doing things just for the sake of change, and I still really wish there was a nicer way of handling building re-usable controls.
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>If you don't mind me asking whats your current choice of now and immediate future development tool Paul ?

I am mainly doing VFP development and ASP.NET/C# development right now. I really like C# as a language, even if MS sometimes overcomplexifies (pretty sure that's a real work <g>) things. I have done mostly "classic" ASP.NET development but my last two projects I've used ASP.NET MVC. It, like most MS technologies, has things that kind of bug me. They really need a better way of creating "components" and I don't think I like the convention of having separate folders for Models, Views, Controllers (I think I'd prefer the Model/View/Controller grouped by functionality). And I wish it had better tracing built-in. But it has a certain simplicity that I like.

Most of my desktop apps. are still in VFP. I did do a simple project which used WPF and I honestly kind of liked it. But the learning curve is a bit steep.

Overall I'm sticking with the MS/C#/.NET stack. It lets me write desktop apps, web apps, mobile apps (not just Windows 7, but iPhone and Android via Mono), apps. that could run under Linus (again, via Mono), and embedded apps (via the .NET Micro Framework; this is actually a lot of fun to play with).