It's all about the looks ...

Would you be enthusiatic about a Lada, even if the salesman proved it had the engine of a Ferrari? Probably not.

Same goes for software. The user interface says a lot about the application, and in many cases, can easily make up for quirky behaviour and simple bugs. Your customer will always see the interface first and give his first impressions based on it, so it's extremely important.

So the next big thing for interfaces seems to be WPF. I started looking into it, and it looks quite promissing. Visual Studio 2008 has a pretty good editor for it, so it's a good idea to get into it.

For those just starting out, I found a very good (albeit lengthy) hands-on lab that guides you through the steps of putting together an Outlook clone with WPF.

The lab can be found here: http://www.00001001.ch/download/HOL/WPF/Outlook_HOL_WPF.pdf

The original blog post where I found this is here: http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2007/06/13/wpf-hands-on-lab-build-an-outlook-2007-ui-clone.aspx

Enjoy!