Using Animation In Windows Forms With Visual Studio

I'm not exactly sure where to start...

But the first quick thought I had to create animation in forms would be using the shockwave flash object?

Is dropping a .swf file on my form best practice for animation? Or does it make my app too dependent on Adobe Flash if I do this?

I guess my question ultimately is, what should I start learning, or working on to create animation in my C++

By animation I simply mean small sparkles for instances that sparkle around a button when the mouse hovers over it, or a small banner at the top of my windows form that glows or ripples when the form is loaded (simple animations like this).