Ayende wrote about it and I felt I just have to spread the word: balsamiq is GREAT! I played around with the tool for about 10 minutes and then had to have it. Below is my first sketch with the tool – this is about 20 minutes work:

Love it 😀

Agreed – the WPF learning curve is steep, but once one figures out how the basics work, things tend to get amazingly easy. And of course, the emerging sets of toolkits dont’t hurt either.

Here’s another sample – a customer of mine needed a utility to maintain data in their web shop (MySql) and update the shop database based on external data. Here’s the result of about 1.5 days work, starting pretty much from scratch (click on thumbnail for the screenshot):

And once more, I have to say: LLBLGen ist a wonderful tool – setting up database mappings is a breeze, and the generated entities play very nice with WPF. Kudos to Frans Bourma for this one!

Robby Ingebretsen published the source code of his incredibly useful (and beautiful!) Kaxaml on CodePlex. I often prefer Kaxaml over Visual Studio because it combines a bunch of really smart features with a very nice UI that just makes it a pleasure to work with. I’m definitely looking forward to have a peek at its internals 🙂

CodePlex project site: http://www.codeplex.com/Kaxaml
Official Kaxaml download site: http://www.kaxaml.com