It's pretty sad that it took until February for my first post of the new year but {insert lame excuse about being too busy here}.
It has been quite a while since I made my last prediction and I was completely wrong with the last one so I think it time to try again.
I've recently seen a number of WPF demos [1][2] and they are quite stunning. Despite the huge differences between WPF and the WinForms/Win32 stuff I think that we will see a very quick adoption of this technology.
WinForms apps have a reputation of being clunky and slow, especially visually and I have certainly seen this to be the case in developing our own business application. It amazes me that the .Net Framework cannot cleanly render a form with a few dozen textboxes on it without seeing some artifacts of the rendering process. Maybe I'm exaggerating a bit, but I don't think anyone would describe WinForms UI's as snappy.
What I find frustrating is why can't our business UI's be snappy when the same machine can render Doom in 3D at 1600 x1200 at 60 fps? The difference is DirectX and hardware acceleration on graphics cards. With WPF, business apps finally get the opportunity to take advantage of all of this goodness.
I think after a few WPF apps have hit the mainstream, no-one will want to look at anything WinForms based. But I have been wrong before :-)