I sat through the first part of Kathleen Dollard's session on WPF Fundamentals.  The first 15 minutes or so were interesting since Kathleen had some pretty strong words on designing/developing WPF applications.  Now, I admit right here that I did not catch the last 40 minutes of her presentation, so maybe some of her statements were tempered a bit later in the session.  To paraphrase, Kathleen basically said that one of the biggest barriers to doing WPF development is that the tools suck right now.  I found that kind of interesting and to some degree a bit over the top.

I think what Kathleen was trying to say was the the Visual Studio tools for developers suck (including Visual Studio 2008), and I would agree to an extent.  I would probably use the words "less than adequate" instead of "suck".  The VS experience is not as good as it should be, especially if you are used to WinForm or ASP.NET dev.  Some of that has to do with shortcomings in the tool, and I think some of it comes from the lack of "real world" understanding of what developers really want out of the VS design experience and how WPF is being used in traditional LOB scenarios.  Where I really diverge with Kathleen's perception is that I think Blend is a pretty darn good tool for doing WPF.  Yes, as a developer there are things that I would like different in Blend, but all in all it is a pretty rich tool.  And now that it is part of MSDN, it is more readily accessible to a lot of people.  

I assume that Kathleen spent the remainder of her session showing how to build a WPF in VS and hand-hacking XAML since that is kind of what she said she was going to do.  There were a lot of people new to WPF in that room and I guess my "heartburn", if you want to call it that, over what Kathleen said was that I think it gave an overly negative perception of what is involved in building WPF apps today since Blend is absolutely a tool developers can and should be using in WPF projects.  I think Kathleen did a great job of explaining the value of WPF and why developer's should care, but I would have framed the state of dev tools differently.  And I totally agree with Kathleen that the VS experience needs to be better and I also agree with her when she says that it is just a matter of time and Microsoft will get there.

So what would I say???  Basically what I have said in other posts.  WPF is the future but it is not for every application today.  There is a learning curve and people need to seriously weight the reward/benefit of that curve for their particular app.  The tooling is good if you have access to Blend, but you will still need to hand-hack XAML in certain situations.  A design-capable person on a project is very useful, some say mandatory, for UIs that want to exploit WPF beyond a WinForm look and feel.  Keep an eye  on it - some day you will need it.

It was just interesting to here a different perspective and how it was framed to the audience.