I have had versions of all of this stuff installed for some months now. Stuff you ask… this stuff:

• Expressions Blend
• Visual Studio Orcas (and .net 3.5 friends)
• Visual Studio 2005 extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (WCF & WPF), November 2006 CTP
• Infragistics NetAdvantage for WPF
• ReSharper 3.0 EAP

All of these things - individually are nice and fine-ish. They all crash and flop – but they are somewhat OK. Now that I am trying to really do productive work using multiple of these together – I am agahst at the pain in the (*&#$ that I am having with these darn tools!!!! All I can say is that I cannot wait for a single IDE that I can use to make WPF based desktop apps.

• Resharper efforts – abandoned in Orcas (hard to work without it I must admit!). Too many flops – ‘nuf said. This is hard for me as I am a die hard fan! Working for the most part in VS2k5+Cider.
• Orcas – does not play nice – crashes while working a good bit. I will say the designer seems more stable than the Cider (VS2k5 Addins) stuff. The best part is really the nice designer, which I cannot get to play with Infragistics, but is lovely for the “base stuff”
• VS2k5 Cider Addins – designer flops hard – often - painfully, but I am still using it lots
• Blend – happy to say – relatively stable, using mostly with Infragistics stuff – both play nicely. I am NOT happy that the code editing has to take place – elsewhere, I cannot get a good flow here yet (I guess again – i am lost without ReSharper ). NO XAML Intellisense ????
• Infragistics stuff – nice in general. Not too many flops that I can attribute to some IGistics-ism. Once designing in Blend, and editing it more in VS2k5+Cider works

Again – it all works - more or less, it is just not like normal work yet. My current mode is still – style in blend where I can (using some inline XML Data Source stuff to make it look like something). Edit in VS2k5+Cider (Resharper works for the most part), back ‘n forth. Orcas is basically out of the loop – except stand alone “play”.

Thus far – that is my story – may it improve soon!

-Chris

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