I've been on an 'animate everything' kick lately, my first target was dialogs. With the new transparent windows in the July CTP, WPF makes it extremely easy to animate the opening and closing of the dialog windows.
I modeled my dialog effect on the popular web technique 'lightbox' (aka greybox), a simple example of which is Lightbox JS, but it should be quite simple to custom tailor your own dialog.
The cool thing here is that the dialog is a real modal dialog, not just another element at the top of the visual tree.
You'll have to excuse my really lame sample project though- I haven't yet written the rest of the app this was intended for. I'm hoping everyone has a good imagination instead.
The box in the middle is a fully modal dialog- I styled it to remove the titlebar and added some fade in/fade out behavior. The main window is just animated to 50% opacity when the dialog comes up. The alternative could have been to overlay 50% transparent rectangle but this way I was able to make the dialog class quite portable. Since the dialog is modal, the OS prevents click-throughs to the main window.
The only tricky part was delaying the actual dialog close to allow time for the outro animations to complete, but that really was quite trivial.
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