Creating an animated splash screen like office 2010

Question

How can I create an animated splash screen like the one in Office 2010 using C#?

Answer 1

Is this question about winforms or wpf?

If it's about wpf:

An animated splash screen is not more than a wpf window showing while your "Main Window" is loading. You can design this splash window with Expression Blend as explained by wischi.

You can also have a look at this code project.

For creating some kind of a loading animation: A Simple WPF Loading Animation

Just create a window with an animation defined in xaml and show it while your application is loading -> animated splash screen.

In Winforms:

You may have to override the paint method of a form to create an animation. But it's still showing another window which contains an animation while another window is loading.

Answer 2

I recommend using WPF for modern application design and your splashscreen problem.
Expression Blend is a nice tool for creating animations and xaml designs. But you can also design animations by writing plain xaml as well

Expression Blend Tutorials
Animation Using Expression Blend: How to create an animation
Animation Using Expression Blend: How to start animations on events

MSDN Info
Animation Overview

Using Winforms it will be much more complicated. The entire GUI is rendered by the CPU (no GPU support) but you can create a custom usercontrol and overwrite the Paint event and use GDI for drawing, but this will be much more complicated then using wpf.