Yes, Microsoft has released Microsoft Expression Studio 2 with the goal to seperate the designers from the developers, yet producing well-made applications. I don't know the marketing of these, but these are great tools for developing. Also, XAML is very nice, and also with Microsoft Silverlight...

One of my friend has made pretty nice animations in xaml without WPF/E for example : http://www.netfx3.fr/xaml/vaisseaux1/vaisseau.xaml I've tried to host one in my website and I've got an 404 error page : http://www.neldim.fr/Cube.xaml ??? Can you tell me why please ? Thanks Regards David