During all my Silverlight and WPF talks, one point I try to make is that in those technologies, the important aspect of an out-of-the-box control is not its particular display properties, but its model and its ability to be customized.

Back when we used to do Windows Forms work, you often picked third-party controls based on how many UI customization tweaks they offered (fonts, colors, one or two values in a column, ability to have a drop-down list inside a cell etc.). In WPF and Silverlight, this is largely moot as the designer has a lot of flexibility with the user interface. Need to program against a listbox, but have the flexibility to have it look like a carousel? No problem, because the two are conceptually the same thing (list of items, way to navigate between them, one item is "selected" etc.).

This just came up on a Silverlight mailing list. I had forgotten all about this excellent set of examples. Be sure to check out the Silverlight 2 Solar System, Slide Show and Marquee examples, all of which are based on unusual uses of standard controls like the ListBox and ScrollViewer.

Below is a screenshot of one use of a ListBox