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I've been finding WPF development very slow going, I know this is partly due to inexperience but I suspect mostly because WPF and its tooling is not polished enough.

In particular I find myself diving into the XAML all the time, whereas I hardly look at the generated code in my WinForms application.

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That was my experience with WPF as well - I would far rather use Winforms. (n.b., if there's a library & GUI designer for the web that emulates Winforms well enough, I would love that).

Only when the HTML/CSS/JavaScript Frankenstein gets fixed.

This is why I never liked frontend web development, it is such a pain compared with what native toolkits are capable of.

Maybe webcomponents will finally fix this.

XAML is evil, thankfully you don't have to use it with WPF, and I dont.

So are you building your application by just creating the object model in code or using the designer and never looking at the XAML?

All code, i even wrote a helper framework to make coded wpf more powerful:

http://bling.codeplex.com

You can write things like button.Left = label.Right + 20 and it will synthesize the data binding code automatically.

Sadly, there are some circumstances where XAML is virtually inescapable (e.g. constructing templates; you can use the deprecated FrameworkElementFactory, but it's pretty ugly).

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