SandDock Tabbed Documents

Home / Products / SandDock for Windows Forms

SandDock utilises its advanced window management system to provide state-of-the-art tabbed document functionality for your application. Its controls seamlessly integrate tabbed documents with dockable windows and give you control over how the user interface is drawn. Designed to completely replace the traditional MDI paradigm, SandDock's tabbed document support mimics document management in Microsoft Visual Studio.

Packaged as standard are renderers that can mimic the appearance of the tabbed documents in Microsoft Visual Studio 2003, Visual Studio 2005 and OneNote 2003. Standard close buttons are available for all documents along with events to trap and optionally cancel closure. When screen space is tight and document tabs are clipped, buttons allow smooth scrolling to access them. Events are raised to make keeping track of which document is "active" easy.

Integrating tabbed document support in to your application is simple. Replacing your existing MDI architecture with SandDock tabbed documents is straightforward due to the familiar methods and events supported by the library.

Though documents can be split in to complex hierarchies, SandDock maintains a flattened list of documents for easy programmatic access. The user can split documents by dragging their tabs, and programmatic access to this functionality is also provided. Translucent docking hints like the ones present in Visual Studio 2005 are provided as standard to make dragging and docking a more intuitive experience.

For keyboard accessibility, SandDock also supports the standard ctrl-tab and ctrl-shift-tab shortcuts to switch between active documents.

Advanced features like allowing your user to float certain documents, or even dock them as if they were dockable windows, are fully supported. The extensible nature of SandDock combined with common features between windows means that whatever design you are hoping to achieve, it's likely our tools will be able to help you.