You don't need to write the markup yourself with WPF. You can drag components into the designer just the same as with winforms assuming you are using Visual Stu

You don't need to write the markup yourself with WPF. You can drag components into the designer just the same as with winforms assuming you are using Visual Studio, and everything will look pretty standard unless you go out of your way to change it. As to the databinding, I find that WPF has more upfront work in databinding, in that you actually have to write some code, but that it's a lot more flexible in the long run. When I used to write winforms, I usually ended up with a lot of business logic embedded in hooks. It was a mess and was hard to reason about.