UI design in WPF - creating non-standard UI

Question

Okay, so I had a really, really hard time formulating my title because I couldn't come up with a short phrase that would justify what I was trying to say in a clear way. Sorry about that.

But, to the question: I asked a week or so ago about whether to use C# or Adobe Air for some quite simple applications, and I've not made my final decision while playing around in both languages (and platform).

But, I also tried to GUI-designer (WPF in C#) and compared to the one in Adobe Air it felt really pointed at a business-point of view application compared to Air (and it's UI). Mostly because Air has a lot more "oomph" when it comes to the general look, feel and customization of it's UI. In Air where adding animations, designing everything from buttons to the frame in WPF it was always strictly the WPF-way, it didn't intuitively give me any way to do design in a more Air-ish way.

Yeah, this question too might be a bit vague and possibly hard to answer, sorry about that. But I was wondering if anyone has any kind of resource, tips or can simply just answer me if the UI-designing part in WPF is (from my point of view) lackluster compared to Adobe Air (in terms of customization and that kind of stuff).

And answers is as always very much appreciated :)

Answer 1

Expression Blend has much more advanced WPF/Silverlight visual designer than Visual Studio including WYSIWYG animation editor etc,

Answer 2

I haven't played with Air to compare the two. But WPF's simplicity also allows it to be very expandable. You won't get too far with the prefab WPF controls as they are, but creating your own UserControls lets you combine these simple elements in ways that make single, more impressive controls. Once you get the hang of DependencyProperties and Binding, you'll find yourself making very neat controls that function exactly how you want them to, and completely reusable.

But I hear you about some basic WPF controls being omitted *cough*NumericUpDown*cough*

:D