Sometimes it's the tiniest little changes that make you happy out of all proportion to the size of the change. While testing the WPF features in VS2010 I was totally thrilled to discover that at last when you type in the opening curly brace in the XAML Pane, you get an Intellisense list of useful choices. The top one, of course, is StaticResource. If I had a penny for every time I've laboriously typed out that name, I'd be a rich man!
The same feature also offers other commonly used properties such as Binding. And once you have entered 'Binding' and a space, you also get Path, again courtesy of Intellisense.
On the subject of DataBinding, which is a key feature in WPF of course, the Properties Pane has been improved. Now if you select a control such as a ListView, the ItemsSource property is available in the Properties Pane and you can select the Binding from the available choices:
Maybe I've missed a trick, though, because when I tried to drill deeper into the ListView components and looked at the binding for a GridViewColumn, there didn't seem to be a way to select a value for the DisplayMemberBinding. If in the XAML Pane I manually typed in a valid Path, i.e. a field from the data source behind the DataContext, then that would be shown in the Properties Pane. But I couldn't find an option to switch the Path to a different field within that dialog.
I quite liked the way you can now view and choose from all the Resources in scope. This example shows where I am building a ListView and using a CellTemplate, for instance:
I noticed that when using the Properties Pane in this way, it can have an annoying habit. You close the dialog window by clicking anywhere outside it (i.e. it doesn't have a close/x button). If you are careless about where you click, you will deselect the current element in the XAML Pane. Often, if you click in the Design Pane to deselect, you will be taken back to the root element. It would be nice if a close button is added to the dialog windows at some point.
You can also pick and assign a saved Style for the Style property of any element. In this example I am offered all the previously created styles which can be assigned to a TextBlock element:
Another super improvement in the Properties pane is the color picker feature. If you select a property which can be assigned a color (well, to be more accurate, a brush), then you can click on the little down arrow at the right hand side of the property in the Properties pane and a color picker dialog will appear:
This example shows the Background property of a TextBlock. You can play with the color picker until you have the exact look you want. if you've used Expression Blend you'll recognize this layout.
You can still select a named color if you want. The drop down list is at the bottom left of the color picker:
Overall, I like the new look of the VS2010 editor and the new features I've found so far.