http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-phasing-out-some-of-its-expression-design-tools-7000009116/

For those of us who have danced the Microsoft Dance many times, the writing on the wall should be clear...

The XAML oriented UI tools be phased out ( dropped ) and capabilities will be added to the already great (IMHO) VS ... which has increasingly strong support for javascript and HTML5 ( and which has more an more extension for the like of Coffeescript ... )

Silverlight is already dropped into the Redmond Oubliette.

Finding MS references to XAML and WPF will someday be like looking for pictures of Trotsky or Yezhov in a Stalin era Soviet textbook.

This could not be any more clear if that had shot the XAML team on Channel 9 ( and buried them with the Linq to Sql group )

And yet 5 years from now there are going to be a bunch of developers feeling "blind-sided" and abandoned.

(And others who will wonder if there is a way to port their Foxpro 2.0 Dos screens to jquery-UI or if they can use DBFs in a cloud and still let the user Browse and GO TOP :- ) Some things never change.

The VS stack will be a service API and variety of ORM flavors and jquery / html5 all working nicely in VS. No problem using C# and EF as part of the equation with .NET classes handling a lot of heavy lifting on the server side. (and still being able to swap all that out for a non-MS backend)

For my money, that's a win. I've been playing with Knockback.js and I'm impressed though it is still a little daunting when I am new to both Knockout and Backbone, but so much of this stuff really makes sense. Really have to shake myself every once in a while to not hang on too hard to things I already know, but man, this stuff is cool ! I have not enjoyed development this much for at least 10 years.