As a new WPF developer, coming from a winforms background, I've got to recommend just biting the bullet and going with WPF and the MVVM model ...
I'm working on a real-time application that has as its data model a stream of data arriving every 200 ms.
It has to present this data graphically and also allow the user to make configuration changes using various controls on screen.
I read a couple of articles on MVVM and also downloaded some video tutorials on WPF+MVVM from microsoft.
I did miss the numeric updown but to implement your own updown is really trivial using a simple WPF user control in XAML.
The main advantages of WPF I've seen so far are user controls, binding, animation, dependency properties and the whole MVVM thing ...
these are huge improvements and for me have been a revelation ... like going from the dark ages to the 21st century of UI development!
