Not only will the Animated Activity Designer allow you to create a cool looking animated custom activity in the Windows Workflow Designer, you can integrate the custom animated activity designer into your project using only 2 lines of code by applying the following 2 attributes to your custom activity:

[Designer(typeof(AnimatedActivityDesigner), typeof(IDesigner))]
[AnimatedActivityDesigner(EmbeddedGifResourceName = "AnimatedActivityLib.FileMove.gif")]
public partial class MoveFilesActivity : System.Workflow.ComponentModel.Activity
{
      public MoveFilesActivity()
      {
            InitializeComponent();
      }
}

A common question I can anticipate being asked is "Why?". So, here's why I created it and my reason as to why you may want to use something like this.

First off, the reason I wanted to try to created animated activities within the Windows Workflow designer was merely to see if it was possible. I knew that I could override OnPaint so I pretty much already knew it was going to be possible (otherwise I probably wouldn't have gone down the path). The second reason is simply because as a guy that loves cool eye candy in UI's, I just had to do it.

So why would you ever want to create an animated activity? Let's say you create an application that hosts the Windows Workflow Designer. Let's also assume that this application is used by your customers. You present them with the designer surface and within a Toolbox like panel, you have your set of custom activities they can use. If pictures are worth a thousand words, then an animation with 10 frames is worth 10,000 words.

The actual code for this is really simple which is also why it only took a couple of hours to get it up and running. Since it is so easy, I won't waste your time explaining it (but feel free to ping me if you have any questions).

For more information go to http://blogs.msdn.com/markhsch/archive/2006/09/22/766886.aspx