Once upon a time I thought about a beautiful 3D desktop on Windows XP. I found a way to show a 32-bit bitmap on the desktop which supported the alpha channel. ( you can find a sample here )
Now here is a test to display a 3D object in desktop.

This is a simple sample of layered windows in Windows XP. layered window is a new functionality that Windows 2000 introduced first. They are 32-bit graphical windows that support alpha channels for transparency and translucency to top-level windows. Implementation is so easy and the result is excellent. for more information about layered windows just click here
In this sample, I try to make a funny useful application to represent the weather in your city. I wrote the sample in the non-Unicode Pascal compiler for the Persian language and now I just do some little changes to display English fonts correctly.

Download GetWeather execution NOTE: Only works on Windows XP!