Wow! This WPF is pretty bloody awesome
After reading the excellent introduction to data visualisation from Ivan Towison, I reckoned I could probably sort out my file monitor GUI using a “custom list within a custom list” style data template.
So I sat down at my desk about ten minutes ago to investigate the problem, I’ve got two machines at the moment - on one I opened up VS2008 and was going to attach the problem via the XAML view .. on the other machine I’ve installed M$ Expression Blend .. so that I could see how well this could help me investigate the UI problem.
Well .. I didnt even bother using the XAML .. Blend was just drag and drop, create a stub of example event XML and, after a couple of successively better attempts, I’d created a multi-level list within a list data template for my multi-source events. Sorted! Bish, bash, bosh! Lovely jublee! 
It’s not often I go wow with new technology but the ease at which I did the above (in about 5-10 minutes) was pretty bloody amazing.
It brings home just how well the’ve managed to seperate presentation issues from data production ones - I mean I was wondering how different WPF was over traditional style sheets, CSS, javascript etc but wasn’t prepared for this order of magnitude jump in ability.
Obviously this is early days for me .. there’s still plenty of scope for bad news .. but it’s looking good so far.
NB: I had a quick look at the XAML that had been generated by M$ Blend and reckon tools are the way to go for me for the time being.