How do you build your GUIs?

Hand-code or use a visual designer? It's one of these religious things for some people, like where do you put your squiggly brackets, same line or next line?

In the past I have used layout managers like JGoodies Forms or MiG. Both excellent, both code based (although you can get designers for Forms). The problem I have found with using code is not in the initial build, it's in the maintenance, when a customer says, "Actually, I'd like this new field added and all this other stuff moved round". That can be tricky to visualise when you are looking at a screen full of code trying to figure out in your head what you need to change to get the new look the customer has asked for. Some people find that easy to do (visualise the look of the screen by reading code), I don't. JGoodies Forms in particular can be hard to decipher to work out what the screen will look like.

So for that, a visual designer is really helpful. You can see immediately what the screen will look like, just drag this field over here, move that down a bit, and drop my new component in there... I quite like Matisse (the NetBeans designer), it's easy to use and gives good results. The code is generated for me, code-folding hides it, I never look at it. Why would I? I have not yet seen any sort of performance problem or bug with the Matisse-generated code.

On the other hand, sometimes you want to get a bit more clever and start doing things that Matisse can't do, and in that case you need to drop back to doing it in code. And you can't really start with Matisse's code and add in the features you want, it's better then to start right from scratch with hand-crafting the layout.

At the end of the day, I'm agnostic. Sometimes code is better, sometimes a designer tool is better.