I feel your pain. I'm trying to convert a large winforms app (with visual inheritance used all over) to WPF and I'm nearly bald now from pulling all my hair out. If anyone has any way to do visual inheritance in WPF it would make my job so much easier. As it is I now have to make my code base about 100 times bigger without it. And if anyone asks my boss asked me to convert it. I consider it a total waste of time, but he pays the bills so I'm doing it.

I have an application written in Delphi that use visual inheritence a lot that I would like convert to Java. I've figured out that I could hand code the forms (have about 2000 forms), but recode them by hand would kill me. I saw that eclipse has a few addons that I can purchase that will do this the GUI way simular to the method that delphi uses, but I just happen to like the user friendlyness of Netbeans, but their form editor does not do visual inheritence. Are there any other options that anyone can recommend?