Although the Visual Studio WPF Designer improved a lot in Visual Studio 2010, there are still some external tools that I use in my day to day WPF development.
Snoop
Snoop is a standalone WPF inspector that can attach to the WPF application of your choice and let you explore its visual content. It provides a couple of very handy features for identifying elements in your application. But it also allows you to do a lot more, including:
- Identifying recently changed properties.
- Edit writable properties.
- Identify unset properties.
- Delve into property bindings.
- Preview and zoom a specific element.
- 3D zoom to show the visual composition of an element.
Kaxaml
Kaxaml is a lightweight XAML editor that gives you a "split view" so you can see both your XAML and your rendered content (kind of like XamlPad but without the gigabyte of SDK).
XAML Power Toys
XAML Power Toys are a Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Add-In or a Visual Studio 2010 Add-In that empowers WPF & Silverlight developers while working in the XAML editor. Its Line of Business form generation tools, Grid tools, DataForm, DataGrid and ListView generation really shorten the XAML form layout time.
http://karlshifflett.wordpress.com/xaml-power-toys/)
Do you know some other useful tools?