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You probably think that the Silverlight and WPF designer support is similar, if not equivalent, in Visual Studio 2010. Not quite.
Yes, the tools are the same, and yes, the "look and feel" is the same.
But there are several cases in which the behavior is different. One came up recently while recording the Silverlight and WPF courses, Part II. I was covering a chapter on shapes, and wrote the same code for both courses that displayed various shapes in a Canvas control. When I tried the WPF project, everything appeared in the designer, as I expected. In the Silverlight project, many times, the shapes didn't appear at design-time at all, but only at runtime.
Beware when using Visual Studio to design Silverlight applications that use shapes, curves, and other drawing features--you may need to view the application at runtime to determine if you have created the correct markup. An alternative, of course, is to use a different XAML-based editor (Expression Blend, anyone?)