For a long time now, I have been stuck with Windows Forms development (started with VB6, and has continued through to C# .NET 4.5), and I have pretty much hit the limit of w
First of all, in WPF (XAML) in Visual Studio deisgner, you should always use the xaml code to build you UI and do not drag and drop you control! You need to keep your code clean. You can use Expression Blend to help you, it's more graphic oriented with drag and drop, but it's not free.
It's not a big learning curve, but I think you should learn how to do your xaml by hand instead of searching for alternative.