Well, I'm not a Designer this is fact, and those who do not have designer skills suffers a lot with the new interface technologies, among them WPF. Those who do not have a designer knowledge will suffer to create beautiful interfaces with Blend. What's more, there is the added disadvantage that Blend study materials are quite thin.
I am the time of the desktop applications with the traditional windows and I could use WPF and create the interface of my application based on the traditional visual ideas of windows form, but I think doing that is to play through the drain all the power of design of WPF and Blend. But because I'm not a designer, I do not have the creativity to create something really beautiful. What do I have left? Look for inspiration in other applications that make advanced use of WPF.
I'm starting to create the main window of the application, ie the MainWindow, and as inspiration I'm looking at the image below:
There are several techniques and components that were used to build this window, so I'm trying to analyze it in parts, to try to get a visual close to that one. First I'm looking for a response to two characteristics:
1 - How it was done to change the look of the title bar and how it was able to insert buttons, context menu, text fields, etc. in it.
2 - Will the window background be an image or effect created in Blend itself?