Develop Reference

Creating a picturebox/mapview type control with clickable rectangles and animated icons

I'm looking to add a 'mapview' type control to my project.
It must have a 'main map' image with clickable transparent rectangles with borders and icons/images that can be animated when an event occurs.
What would be the best way of achieving this using windows forms in C#?
My first thought was to use a picture box with other items on top of it but I might run into problems with transparency etc.
Are there any libraries or anything out there that would be able to achieve this?

No need for a library, really:
I would go for a regular doublebuffered Panel subclass or even a PictureBox subclass for the board/map along with a movable Label or Panel subclass fpr the rectangles/items.
Important: Make sure the Labels are not just 'put on top' of the PictureBox but really nested!! (lbl.Parent = pbox). Then transparency will work just fine..
Since PictueBox is not a 'container', to nest a control in it you need code. But since you probably want to create them dynamically this is not an issue anyway.
This assumes that the rectangles are not overlapping! For overlapping controls transparency in winforms will not work.
The clearer you understand the 'animate when event' part the easier the rest of the code will be..
Since you mention 'animation', a word of warning: Simple animation, especially in reponse to a user action is doable; for more classy animation you may run into the limits of winforms.

How to make controls stay in a distance of each other when adding them programmatically?

I have a panel, which I add controls programmatically to it. I want each control stay in a far from other controls and not stay on top of them.
for this purpose I can calculate a position for each control based on Panel's size, but it seems a bit odd.
Is there a way to make controls be added in a line and when it ended they be added in another line?

You can use a FlowLayoutPanel to achieve what you're describing. It's under Containers in the ToolBox. Set the direction to horizontal and it will flow from left to right, and wrap when it needs to.

I believe the WrapPanel class does what you're describing in WPF. Or the FlowLayoutPanel in WinForms.

You have a few options. You can use one of the containers such as FlowLayoutPanel or TableLayoutPanel. You can also nest them in each other. And you have to set the Margin property for each control you add to the containers.
Sadly the Windows Forms technology lacks on this part a little, while WPF has a very rich layout system. Even somethings like Margin doesn't always work as expected.

Docking buttons in the wpf panels

How can it be done? If there are, for example, four groups of buttons in menu-like panel. How would you dock them to their initial location if the window is resized?
I am trying this using DockPanel and HorizontalAlign, but it seems to only be work for the last button on the right when the window is resized. But how do you dock(anchor) a group of buttons? Maybe put them in border object and use HorizontalAlign for it? Is there more elegant way to do this?

To summarize the comments: I don't know your background but it seems you are used to another way of UI design where you do not explicitely have to specify grouping etc in code. While that might seem more elegant, it is not: the designer generated code is awful and the whole system is not as flexible nor srtaightforward as what WPF gives you..
With WPF you get a clear one-to-one relationship between your intent (treating buttons as a group within a layout) and the actual code (put the buttons in a stackpanel/grid/...). Or draw a border around buttons and organize them vertically within the border vs in xaml use a border with a stackpanel inside. It won't get any more elegant than that.
Read up on WPF layouts and once you'll get a grip of it you will quickly see that it is rather powerful and beatiful at the same time. I found this tutorial pretty helpful when just starting with layouts. And google provides lots and lots and lots more information, as usual.

Like stijn said, put the buttons in a Grid or a Stackpanel and you'll be fine.
You may not think it's beautifull, but it's the best solution for your problem.

Customizing Windows Forms (table)

I have no clue if this is possible or not as I'm new to C#. But is it possible to make a Windows Forms look like the picture? Where you have a
gradient at top
alternating color rows
change the default text color
change the default highlight color
change the way the scroll bar looks
If so, are there tutorials for these someone can point me to?

Gradient effects will take tedious paint task. You have some example here
Alternating Row Colors,
datagridview1.AlternatingRowsDefaultCellStyle.BackColor= Color.Blue;
Change Text Color
datagridview1.RowsDefaultCellStyle.ForeColor = Color.Red;
Change Highlight Color
`datagridview1.RowsDefaultCellStyle.SelectionBackColor = Color.Pink;
As far as I know scroll-bar will have the look of your current system theme and cant be change that easily unless you write your own code for it.

Regarding skinning (gradients, custom scroll bar): WinForms are a wrapper around Win32 native controls. They were not designed with visual appearance customization in mind. It is possible but will require an awful lot of work: There is nothing comparable to CSS in WinForms.
An arguably easier alternative would be WPF.
Of course, the most straightforward might be to look for a 3rd party component such as Krypton's DataGrid (free).

I would like to learn about creating graphic objects at Runtime in c#

I would like to learn about creating a program that I could draw simple shapes and be able to select them for editing - like resizing, order of display, color change. Is there an online resource that someone knows of that would help me reach my goals.
thanks

"GDI+" is what you are looking for. You can start here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/da0f23z7.aspx

A sneaky way I used to do it was to create a custom control, remove the background from it and paint my shapes and sizes on it. Then, you can easily implement selection (override OnClick), dragging and resizing (OnMouseDown, OnMouseMove, OnMouseUp). You can then implement options like color, etc. by means of a property (see Browsable attribute and property get/setters) and a PropertyGrid control.
Anything beyond that, though - Bezier curves and such - would need something a tad more advanced, though.
The alternative is to only use such controls for the sizing handles, and do all the drawing on one central canvas - the only drawback then is figuring out how to select a shape on the canvas.