In Response to Andrew MacNeills comments on: http://akselsoft.blogspot.com/

There's an interesting parallel here actually. Remember FoxPro 3.0? Technically there were many many things we were drooling over, but implementation wise there many things that just weren't working quite right yet. Technically speaking VFP 3 was a huge step up from Fox 2.x.

I think a lot of things in .Net and especially WinForms is exactly that way. It all works, but like in VFP 3.0 there are many things that require weird workarounds or are just slow.

But also remember what happened next with VFP 3.0. Computers got radically faster, MS shipped VFP 5.0 which arguably was a big step up (even if it took til 6.0 to get things stable) and things started falling into place. Slowness in the UI is something that hardware will catch up with eventually catch up with.

The big problem though is that Microsoft is obsessed with 'new and different'. There is a good chance that WinForms will never be fixed right because of the long term horizon of  a big UI change for Longhorn with Avalon (XAML + a new Windows Form engine). The diversion of resources from that is surely one of the reasons we're not seeing top notch controls in the current or near future crop of Microsoft .Net tools.