RIA IDE - Visual Studio 2010, FlashBuilder and ExtJS Designer

Question

I trying to decide whether we went to Flex, Silverlight or even ExtJS. There is one variable missing so that we can make the decision and this is about Visual Studio.

With Silverlight, it looks like if I want a "drag and drop" approach to build my interface I would need Expression Blend to do that.

So the basic question here is: Does Visual Studio 2010 will come with some sort of Silverlight component palet so that you can easily drag and drop it on your interface like you would do with WPF, etc? I don't wanna use Blend - is way too much for what we need - taking the "coding XAML" by hand is out of question as well.

Answer 1

The quick answer to your question is Yes. There is a decent'ish drag drop xaml design part to VS2010.

However I would strongly recommend you look at Blend when doing UI work. RIA to me often means that the applications experience is "Rich", and Blend makes a lot of things trivial compared to VS. Plus it's part of most MSDN subscriptions these days, so cost is less of an issue.