Has anyone tried developing Metro apps?

Is it just me, or does it seem much harder than it should be? There aren't any visual tools to "draw" yourself some tiles or other UI elements. You have to write everything in code?

Has anyone tried developing Metro apps?

Is it just me, or does it seem much harder than it should be? There aren't any visual tools to "draw" yourself some tiles or other UI elements. You have to write everything in code?

There are tools, it's just that those tools are in a different program. The Expression stidop is what you're looking for.

THAT SAID. Without those it is more difficult than it should be at least when getting started. I had a rough time doing some simple things, but some of that could have just been my inexperience with xaml. Looking at the Expression tools I was extremely surprised at how much easier it looked.

It was kind of depressing knowing how much time I would try implementing some of those things in just xaml/code. Custom controls seemed to be especially irritating.

[quote name='shurcool' timestamp='1321941363' post='4886456']
Has anyone tried developing Metro apps?

Is it just me, or does it seem much harder than it should be? There aren't any visual tools to "draw" yourself some tiles or other UI elements. You have to write everything in code?

There are tools, it's just that those tools are in a different program. The Expression stidop is what you're looking for.

THAT SAID. Without those it is more difficult than it should be at least when getting started. I had a rough time doing some simple things, but some of that could have just been my inexperience with xaml. Looking at the Expression tools I was extremely surprised at how much easier it looked.

It was kind of depressing knowing how much time I would try implementing some of those things in just xaml/code. Custom controls seemed to be especially irritating.
[/quote]
Thanks, that was helpful. I totally overlooked their Expression Blend stuff.

Yeah, it's certainly not "easy", but that's because it's not simplified in any way. It's a full fledged HTML5/CSS editor that allows you to access all properties and edit them, etc. Better than nothing, but there's a lot of room for creating easier to use high level tools.