Paul has just made an insightful post about the history and future of visual form designers with a Windows Presentation Foundation focus.

I love his concept of a designer that focuses on styles and resources, and gives you a faux-3D "model" of your form rather than trying to accurately render it. That would be really handy for WPF.

Let's face it - WPF is a pretty big step away from the WinForms method of form layout (unless you specifically opt for the Canvas approach and set your controls' Left and Top properties manually). In reality it's a lot closer to HTML - and who here uses a visual designer for their HTML? I tried FrontPage once and to this day I still wake up screaming some nights.

Anyway, give Paul's post a read. Great stuff.