If you haven't looked at WPF and Expression Blend yet it's important that you do so immediately.  The fact that I can do those cool effects from managed code is fantastic.  For example, I had a tool written for our support teams that would allow them to right-click on a JPG in Windows and choose "View Exif" from the menu.  We have customers (if you're a customer and you're reading this, I don't mean you, I mean someone else) who call us saying that their images didn't get associated with a vehicle and this way they can see the image metadata and if the scanner was used right.  I thought it would be cool if this could be in the shape of my company logo instead of a rectangular window, with some partial transparency.  Ignore my pan roasted broccoli with ginger and chilli sauce partially visible through the form.

My first few hours of experimentation with Expression Blend and WPF are very promising.  Besides creating this non-rectilinear window you can scale and rotate about anything and give the appearance of things being detached from your main window.  Behold my incredibly confusing rotated ListBox and detached close button.  The rotated ListBox shows the danger in this tool: remember things like the <blink> and <marquee> tags?  Bad ideas that looked cool for about five seconds and later made the bad-design hall of fame will be oh-so-easy for developers to unleash on unsuspecting users now.  Mitigating that risk is the fact that it appears seperation of the Designer's World from the Programmer's World is cleaner and more appropriate than many past attempts at supporting this separation of labor.  This aspect is most exciting to me: I would love to be able to tell our marketing partner who does our graphics to just go crazy with the user interface and email me the XAML so that I can work on putting functionality behind a top-notch design and not worry too much about us unintentionally trampling each other's work.  This is very, very cool.