Wow - GREAT news. This was EXACTLY my issue, no forms designer.

I'm mostly developing server on linux so I'm not enough of designer to even begin to wrap my head around XAML / MVVM / WPF / UPF (?) new world order on windows.

SO glad they are going to allow for some simpler approaches - and no, I don't want to build skinnable apps for business - I actually LIKED that all the apps looked / worked basically the same in the old world even though that's no longer cool.

We now have some silverlight apps, some IE only apps, some WPF / UPF apps. But the old winforms apps still get lots of use and still work. I've found the "better" WPF / UPF stuff to kind of lag and stutter even sometimes - I've got no idea why. The winforms apps on new machines are snappy.