Yeah I always create all of the controls in XAML rather than dragging controls using the designer, like you said, things don't work as you would expect if you just drag n drop them on. Oh and yeah the designer is a little heavy and slow sometimes (even with 8 GB RAM, a solid state hard disk, a quad core CPU and a 1 GB graphics card) but I've just kind of got used to that.

While I'm here, here's a couple of updated screenshots of my current project, though not really doing anything that impressive visually, I hope it looks fairly clean and easy to use





The nice thing is that there's no VB code populating anything in those tabs on the right when the user clicks a specific node in the tree (or even telling it which tab to show), its all done through databinding Well actually there's a few lines of VB code in the Converters that some of the bindings use but not a lot.

Oh and I really need to get round to using your treeview style Nick to get rid of that ugly solid blue rectangle selection on the treeview!