SandDock Dockable Windows

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The dockable windows in SandDock offer a huge amount of flexibility while retaining the great design-time experience that is expected from advanced .NET controls. Docking windows at design time is performed the same way as at runtime - with drag and drop. This makes SandDock dockable windows the best choice to work with in your application.

Along with the great designer support comes a good degree of flexibility when it comes to drawing. SandDock includes three renderers, that mimic Visual Studio 2003, Office 2003 and Visual Studio 2005. Alternatively, for the ultimate fine-grained control over drawing you can write your own rendering component - either from scratch or by inheriting one of the ones provided.

A dockable windows library is nothing without good programmatic access to docking methods. All common scenarios are addressed, from making sure that wherever the user has placed (or hidden) a particular control it can be shown, to docking a control within the same parent as another. Access to floating windows is also provided.

If you are writing a large-scale application with many dockable windows, it is likely the user will want to take advantage of all the customisation features of SandDock. Once they have achieved a layout they are comfortable with, they will expect their layout to be persisted the next time they start your application. SandDock features full layout serialization through two easy methods that can represent a full layout of dockable windows with a string containing XML.

To conserve screen space it may be desirable to temporarily hide some dockable windows. Through the "pushpin" button the SandDock dockable windows can be collapsed to a small area at the side of the form, where they can be popped up by clicking on their tabs. When popped up, collapsed dockable windows do not subtract from the client area of your form.

The dockable windows themselves offer a range of border styles, hints at design time and events to hook for when the user presses the close button. They also offer properties which dictate whether to offer a close or collapse option, and show a small image on their tab.

User Interaction

SandDock offers a choice of docking hints to show while redocking or floating is in progress. It can display the traditional "rubber band" effect or alternatively can display a translucent themed rectangle to show precisely where a window will be dropped while maintaining a view of the controls underneath. The default behaviour is to use the translucent docking hints, reverting back to rubber bands if your operating system does not support layered windows (Windows 98 and ME).

Any single dockable window or tabbed group of windows can be dragged to any other docking location on a form, or "torn off" to form a floating window. This capability is presented to the user by simple dragging and dropping, and is exposed to the developer for programmatic access with helper methods.