Microsoft lately has been advertising the divorce of the UI from the underlying development and code.
I think this a very erroneous and poor way to market their latest suites of technology; namely, XAML (presentation markup) & Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). In the presentations/training that I've attended, it was reiterated over and over that developers don't know how make UI's or lay things out that a user would want to see.
I believe UI's haven't been as imaginative or laid out well because the development tools for UI's haven't been that flexible or good.
By moving the "good" UI tools out of the Dev tools, developers will now have load up yet another environment to do their jobs, or the default way of laying things out will continue. Companies won't find it worth their while to hire a graphic designer for every tool or project. In fact, very few of the projects will ever go through a professional designer's hands.
I think it's nice that Microsoft wants to give a tool to the designer that they can do fantastic things with. But they should include at least a useable set of design manipulation tools to the developers who understand the process and logic of the program/application. They should actually allow the developers to prove they have no idea how to lay things out before they assume developers aren't capable of doing it.
