No offense, but you should spend a bit more time with LINQ before making these statements. LINQ can do everything you "envisaged" and then so MUCH more. I can't tell you the last time I wrote a for each statement. I recommend Ratz's "Pro LINQ" book to learn about the extension methods that drive LINQ. I don't ever use the "sql like syntax" of LINQ, instead learn to use the extension methods themselves and the clouds will part. LINQ really is that cool. Secondly, we have written many production applications (line of business) with Silverlight and WPF and used a designer on very few of them. There are plenty of places to get some nice-looking XAML templates.

I have been using VMs for development for a long time on my laptop and have never noticed any issues with speed. My current client is a major national cable network and when I joined the project earlier this year, the Project Manager handed me a drive with the VM and I was developing in a matter of minutes on a setup that would have taken me at least a day of configuration. This setup is on Windows Server 2003 using VSTS 2008. The .NET solution is huge and has over 10 large projects. I only have 1GB of RAM assigned to the VM. My laptop specs: Intel Core 2 Duo, 2.00 GHz. 4GHz of RAM. Running Vista Ultimate 64bit. I use VMWare Workstation (costs around $200) as I've not been real pleased with any of MS offerings for Virtualization. We've found that it's best to always store the VM on a separate drive (not your hard drive). Also, my current project doesn't involve Sharepoint (thank god), but developing on a VM with Windows Server 2003 (or 2008) for Sharepoint is the only way to go. So, in closing, I highly recommend giving virtualization for dev work a try. I would stick with VMWare if you can afford to do so. I think you'll find that you don't need as much "super power" as you might think.