beautiful win forms application design in c#

Question

How to design a beautiful win forms UI.(a little like MSN message client)

I googled and couldn't find the way to start my befault win forms learning. Did I miss some C# win form design tech? Must I start .net 3.5 study?

.net 2.0 vs2005 used.

Answer 1

You should consider using the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) instead of Winforms for custom UI design. Although you'll have to upgrade your development environment to Visual Studio 2008 or Visual Studio 2010.

WPF is based off of XAML which is an XML based format for defining your application, events, and more. WPF is the recommended technology to use over Winforms by Microsoft. You can get started with this MSDN tutorial: Getting Started with Windows Presentation Foundation.

WPF is nice because it is based on DirectX (no you don't need to know DirectX at all) and will use the GPU and not GDI objects like traditional other UI platforms from Microsoft.

Otherwise if you are really set on using Winforms I'd suggest buying a 3rd party controls library.

Likely the price of Visual Studio though is warranted for just about any project considering hourly wages (times) the amount of hours you would put into any project vs Visual Studio price. You can also use the Express edition of Visual Studio.