Docking control is a WPF control for creating a complex 'Tabbed document interface' layout structure within your application. It enables you to quickly create professional looking applications that provide advanced support for tool window management as found in the visual studio environment.
With Docking control, you can give the users a much larger screen area by allowing them to collapse infrequently used windows to the border. They can also drag and drop the windows to their hart's desire so they can create their own optimal screen layout. Try it, you'll be surprised of the flexibility (for instace, initiating a drag from a collapsed item that's currently visible or repinning a floating window).
And offourse, all these custom layouts can easely be persisted to disk. The control is even able to handle multiple layouts simultaniously allowing for fast switches.
Using the component is almost as easy as using a DockPanel. Simply drop it in a container and add your tool windows as URI's. You don't have to worry about splitter management, window visibility, resizing behavior between docked and undocked windows or drag and drop operations. Even menu items to hide/unhide the tool pages can easily be created with bindings. And it can all be done from within your favorite design tool, no coding required.
The control comes with a default theme that contains images, styles and templates which can all be overwritten. Every part of the control is customizable through styles, templates and drawing resources. The demos also contain extra themes that are available to you.
The library also supports the new UI Automation framework from Microsoft Windows. This is very usefull for building automated user interface tests, and it allows the proper functioning of assistive technology products such as screen readers. You can also download a seperate, free tool for browsing the UI Automation interface of applications. See UIBrowser for more info.