update 2: I also posted this on the forums and the team finally found what was causing this. They explain:

There have been several reports where intellisense has completely stopped working for all projects after installing a version of the Windows SDK or MSDN. We have been able to track down the source of this problem. This seems to only affect installs of the SDK/MSDN post the installation of Visual Studio. One registry value has been incorrectly reset after these installs causing this failure. This issue has been handed off to setup team for a future fix.

In the meantime, if you encounter this issue, it can be fixed using regedit. First, determine if you are seeing this same issue by opening regedit and looking at the key:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{73B7DC00-F498-4ABD-AB79-D07AFD52F395}\InProcServer32

If (Default) is empty you are hitting this issue. To correct the problem, change the value of (Default) to point to the location of TextMgrP.dll on your system (C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\MSEnv\TextMgrP.dll in my case with a C: OS drive and accepting all the defaults). Restart Visual Studio and intellisense should be working again. Thanks to everyone who submitted reports of this issue and gave us the additional details needed to track it down quickly.

Update: If you are running a 64-bit version of Windows, you will need to make sure you are running the correct regedit version (%systemroot%\syswow64\regedit - see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/305097) and you will need to locate the correct path to TextMgrP.dll (such as C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\MSEnv\TextMgrP.dll)

Update: a repair of visual studio eventually fixed this. Lesson learned: a repair does not damage already installed hotfixes and addins, so you do not have to fear losing anything.

I lost my xaml intellisense and I really miss it. I installed SDK 6.1, but I do not know if that was the cause. I was using Resharper, so I didn't notice. However, when I uninstalled resharper, intellisense did not appear again! It could have been the sdk. It could have been resharper. Or something else all together. I just don't know.

Lot's of googling did not really help (2008 is different than 2005), but did point to the importance of two files in your xml/schemas folder:

- XamlPresentation2006.xsd
- xaml2006.xsd

However, VS 2008 does not work with xsd anymore to supply intellisense. I was under the impression that a Xaml-parser service was build. I do not have those files and on another computer (where intellisense works fine), I did not find them either.

I copied them from a vs2005 install, and opened a xaml file in the xml editor. No schemas were defined (nor are they on the healthy computer), but when I pointed to the just copied files, intellisense does work partially again. It does not see usercontrols and stuff. This is not the way it is supposed to work in 2008!

Funny thing though: I now have this intellisense in the xmleditor, but not in sourcecode editor or the designer. In the healthy install, it's the other way around.

Let me know if you have a solution!

Dax Pandhi, of Reuxables is offering a lite version of their commercial theme: paper. You only get the compiled dll, but still, it's a bargain

I have not used any commercial themes yet, and as I am not working for a client at this point, I probably won't at this moment I also do not know yet whether I like the theme. I am going to use it and just see!

Are there other commercial theme packs around? I would like a pack that makes my applications look like this application

If you are working with clients that do not see the use of automated testing (be it in unit tests of code blocks, or specific UI testing), you are in for a hard time. Maybe you should walk away, but let's face it: you will probably give in and try to do your best.
I have even had heated discussions with developers that do not see the use of it, certainly when there are monkey-testers to do it.

Testing the userinterface is incredibly hard to do. When you're testers are brave, they might use a testtool (robot) that will simulate clicks and read out information. However, these scripts have to be updated when the software changes and that is costly.

WPF has great support for UI Automation, which allows other programs to interact with your application's UI from the outside. It does this by naming the elements of your UI and offers 'strategies' to interact with them (Press this button).
It's not an easy framework, but workable.

Project White seems to be an abstract layer on top of the UI Automation stack, released to the public domain by ThoughtWorks today. It's aimed at simplifying your scripts and presenting a uniform API for both Winform and WPF technologies.

I'm looking forward to discovering it's api. This looks nice:

Do you use UI automation to test your application?

Maybe old new, but Microsoft put up new site here which looks like a very nice collection of all the tools that you can get for visual studio.