Orcas Beta 1 - Not ready for the Prime time

I've had Visual Studio Orcas Beta 1 installed on a Virtual PC for a while now, and have mainly been using it to do some Silverlight 1.1 development. For the most part it has worked OK, although I've had a few niggles with it:

• Doesn't let me step through JavaScript (despite turning on Script debugging in IE)
• Insists on covering up part of the code with a toolbar window whenever I run in debug mode.

But today I tried to develop a WPF application in it, instead of simply using Visual Studio 2005 with the .NET 3.0 extensions. The experience was painful. The designer regularly threw exceptions, and Visual Studio itself crashed a few times.

More concerningly, the WPF designer itself seems very lacking in the basic functionality we have come to expect with Windows Forms. I am very enthusiastic about WPF, but if I am to persuade anyone at my work that using it would be a good idea, we need a much better experience for those who just want to create a Window and add controls and event handlers if they are to be tempted away from plain old Windows Forms.

• You have to continually ask the designer to show you just XAML - it defaults to a split view with not enough space to see either the layout or XAML
• Double-clicking a button in the designer doesn't add a handler
• You can't choose font settings in a nice dialog - you just have to know what you can enter into FontFamily
• You can't ctrl-click and drag to copy a control

So unfortunately, Orcas Beta 1 is very much a beta, and still a long way from being a release candidate. Hopefully there will be a beta 2 before too long, with a much enhanced WPF designer, and built-in Silverlight support.