Consistency is great.
Predictability is better.

Simple isn’t neccessarily easy
isn’t neccessarily good design.

Testing is vital and unreliable.

Watch the keynote from the Visit Mix site. It is a great show.

Now for my concerns… :-)

While I really appreciate the desire to enhance the designer’s toolkit with controls that can be used as building blocks in the foundations of our applications I am concerned about potential to abuse. I truly believe that Microsoft is doing it’s best to embrace designers but I wonder if developers will inadvertently take this work and corrupt or commoditize the value that good design can bring to a project.

I am a little fearful of carousel controls and Deep Zoom (Sea Dragon) everywhere when the effort to do these types of interfaces becomes effectively none. They say God is in the details so while I applaud the desire to have people do less grunt work and focus on adding value to a project. Do not lose sight of the details . Developers you can’t always do it all, consult a designer, Business Owners your developers can’t always do it all, consult a designer.

Good design is not a feature it is a pillar of the success of your product.

Oh and here is a picture by Betsy of Bryce singing on the RockBand Stage, sober to boot.