WPF Themes and $-oriented .Net ecosystem

I’ve been using C# .Net and WPF for a few months now on a project with two other colleagues from Valtech. I have to say that besides minor things, I now tend to prefer C# 3.5 language to Java. Linq is very powerful, extension methods are a must, lambda expressions are of great value…

However, I wouldn’t be so enthusiastic with WPF. It’s quite nice for simple things. But when you want to do medium complexity, it’s not so fun. Documentation is not good, performance is not good, Xaml can become more complex to read/write than C# (a non-xml based DSL would help).

Latest problem is the lack of free nice looking themes for WPF. I googled quite a lot and couldn’t find any. The ones I found are all very expensive. This is the last major weakness of .Net : the whole ecosystem is $-oriented.