fancy windows forms

My boss at work, has asked me to make my 2 software products a bit easier on the eye, add some shading, fancy color schemes etc.

This is somehting I have always struggled with. Has anybody got any links to some basic winform design guidelines, graphical style guidelines ?

One thing I am considering is some of the 3rd party libraries like devexpress, however this does not appear to be a quick solution, as it seem to involve replacing existing controls with the fancier ones.

Any information would be greatly appreciated

simon

DevExpress does make good controls. As for style policies, they are implicitly described by the look and feel of the default controls. I personally dislike applications that go out of their way to look very different than all of the other Windows applications that I use (i.e., iTunes for Windows). Making things look a little nicer by writing your own controls or using third party controls is one things, and I realize that you may have no choice here, but I think that different applications should maintain some consistency in their look and behavior.

If you are looking for specific UI guidelines, check out:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511258.aspx

...even though MS doesnt follow their own guidelines...

btw, http://windowsclient.net/ has a lot of resources/examples/videos on how to customize applications. Click on the Learn tab :)