Microsoft must be sick of hearing me bitch and moan and ask for the next thing when the company has just delivered something nearly great. And yes, I'm going to do it again, but understand that I wouldn't spend the energy to ask for the next step if I hadn't found the product useful. So let's start with the high notes.

[ See the Lab Notes blog for a . See Martin Heller's for further and ongoing coverage of Microsoft development technologies. ]

Visual Studio 2010 (VS2010) has a revamped user interface that looks much cleaner than previous versions of Visual Studio, and uses Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) rather than Windows Forms. I like the way this works, at least on a computer with plenty of RAM and a good graphics board. I give the UI a big thumbs-up. I'm told that the UI also supports multiple monitors, but I don't have the hardware configured to try this myself.

Not surprisingly, the WPF designer is even smoother than before. Additionally, you can now generate data-bound WPF controls by dragging items from the Data Sources window to the WPF designer. Even better, the XAML designer for Silverlight achieves parity with the WPF designer; you no longer need to switch out of Visual Studio to Expression Blend to work on a XAML design visually.