Actipro Docking & MDI for WPF

What's New in Actipro Docking/MDI for WPF 2011.2?

• App-Wide Themes - Actipro Themes includes professionally-designed themes that cover all system and Office themes including high contrast mode.  The themes apply to all Actipro controls and optionally to native WPF controls.
• Styles/Templates for Native WPF Controls - Enhanced styles and templates for all native WPF controls (TextBox, ToolBox, TreeView, etc.) are included.  These styles can be automatically applied app-wide via a single line of code.  Or you can choose to use them on specific controls only, accessible via pre-defined style keys.
• Common Asset Pool - There are well over 800 asset resources for each of the system and Office themes supported. All custom and native control styles/templates use the same assets. This ensures that controls placed next to each other always render with similar colors that complement each other.
• Advanced Tinting - Actipro Themes supports the tinting of any theme or portion of a theme towards a certain color. This means that you can take a built-in theme like the Office Silver theme, and make it a red one instead.
• Appearance Improvements - Actipro Themes includes updated menu, toolbar, and statusbar appearances that were inspired by Visual Studio 2010’s look. The simplified design uses a darker workspace area, with lighter content areas in each docking window.  This higher contrast appearance focuses the end user's eye on the content without distracting it with non-active UI elements, thus making for a more effective user interface.

What's New in Actipro Docking/MDI for WPF 2011.1?

• Complete MVVM Support - New updates effectively let DockSite behave like an ItemsControl. It can now bind to a collection of view models. Each view model auto generates a docking window as a container (overridable in the same way you can with ItemsControl) that will wrap the view model and display content for it. An implicitly defined DataTemplate resource for the view model can be used to render the view model's content within the docking window. An ItemContainerStyle can be set on the DockSite to bind docking window properties like Title, etc. to appropriate properties on the view model. New MVVM demos and QuickStarts are included in the Sample Browser, along with some reusable common code (which you are free to use).
• Prism 2.2 and 4.0 Integration - For Prism support, Actipro have added the Docking/Prism Interop assembly, which includes a region adapter for the DockSite control. Once the region adapter has been registered, the DockSite can be registered/named as a region, and you can add one or more views to it. By default, the views will become documents (i.e. DocumentWindows) in the DockSite. This can be altered by adding some metadata to tell the adapter whether you want the specified view to become a document or tool.
• Miscellaneous Updates - Docking windows and containers now support the starting of drag operations programmatically. Also merged all document and tool window styles into a single style for easier definition and support of implicit styles going forward.

What's New in Actipro Docking/MDI for WPF 2010.2?

• Docking/MDI adds complete layout serialization (MDI area too), new layout deserialization options, and many new UI options.

What's New in Actipro Docking/MDI for WPF 2010.1?

• Improved ability to always use a parent DockSite switcher, when there are nested DockSites.
• Fixed issue where docking windows could not be docked into an empty tabbed MDI host.

What's New in Actipro Docking/MDI for WPF 2009.2?

Version 2009.2 adds designer support for Visual Studio 2010 and Expression Blend 3.

What's New in Actipro Docking/MDI for WPF 2009.1?

• Fixed a bug where an exception could be thrown when using non-hosted auto-hide popups in .NET 4.0 beta 2
• Windows 7 Compatible
• Expression Blend Compatible

Actipro Docking & MDI is a complete solution for easily adding a docking tool window and/or multiple document interface to your WPF applications. Allow your end users to drag and dock tool windows wherever they please, and to persist their customizations. Actipro Docking & MDI can also be bought as part of the Actipro WPF Studio.

Actipro Docking & MDI Main Features

Docking Windows
Tool windows can be docked, undocked, floated, auto-hidden, or moved to the MDI area. They can be dragged to new locations and attached to each other to form tab groups. Complex hierarchies can be created and each control in the hierarchy has the ability to be resized via a splitter. Document windows differ from tool windows in that they are restricted to the MDI area, have some additional features for displaying filenames and read-only states, and are intended to have a shorter lifespan, only while open in the UI. Both types of docking windows serve a distinct purpose. As a developer, you have complete control over the capabilities of windows, both at the global and instance levels

Rafting Windows
Tool windows can be rafted so that they appear in their own container above the host window. Dock guides are used to aid in docking into existing dock targets. Rafting occurs when a tool window is dragged but not released over a dock guide. Multiple tool windows can be placed in any hierarchy within the rafting container.

Auto-Hidden Tab Groups
A tab group of tool windows that is docked in the main dock site can be unpinned to enter an auto-hide state. When in this state, tabs for each tool window appears on the outer edges of the dock site. As the mouse moves over a tab, smooth animation is used to bring the related tool window content into view. When the mouse and focus leave the tool window, it uses animation to slide back into place with only the tab visible again.

Tabbed MDI
Tabbed MDI is found in modern applications such as Visual Studio and makes the best use of the MDI area's available real estate. With tabbed MDI, there are one or more tab groups with each tab representing a docking window. Similar to tool windows, windows in tabbed MDI may be dragged to create complex hierarchies of tab groups, each of which can be resized. Menu items are available to quickly create new tab groups or move windows to other tab groups.

Standard MDI
Standard MDI is the original windowed variety of MDI that has been in Windows since the beginning. In this MDI mode, each docking window is represented by a Window-like control that can be moved, resized, minimized, or maximized within the containing workspace area. Cascade and tile operations can be accessed via a single method call. You also can switch between MDI modes at run-time.

Tool Window Inner-Fill
When there is no workspace area within a dock site, the tool window hierarchy fills the entire dock site client area. This is called tool window inner-fill. This mode is useful for applications that don't have a need for MDI or a workspace area and want their application to be made completely of tool windows.

Nested and Side-by-Side Dock Sites
Each dock site and its docking windows are totally self-contained. You can place multiple dock sites next to each other and the tool windows from one will not be able to dock into the other. You can even nest dock sites, where a document window in the root dock site has its own inner dock site that contains tool windows.

Animated Transitions and Effects
Various animated transtions and effects are used throughout the product. When clicking between tool window tabs, you can assign any animated transition that is found in the Shared Library. Actipro built a special transition that scrolls content left, when selecting a tab to the right, and vice versa. It makes for a really great visual effect. When causing auto-hide tool windows to fly out or back in, animations are used to scale, stretch, and/or fade the content. Hosted rafting windows have subtle animations used for fading out after inactivity.

Switchers
Switchers appear when pressing keys like Ctrl+Tab and allow you to quickly navigate to an open docking window via the keyboard. Previews of the docking window contents are available as you make your selection.

Layout Serialization
With any application, it is important to be able to serialize end user customizations. The entire tool window layout can be serialized to XML and saved in a storage medium of your choice (file, database, etc.). Later it can be restored when your application starts, enabling the end user to have their UI customizations restored.

Theming
Built-in themes are include for the three Office themes and all Windows system themes. While this encompasses a lot of built-in themes, you can also generate a completely custom tinted theme with a single line of code. For advanced developers who want even more customization possibilities, all Actipro controls have been made so that they can be styled and templated and all primitive elements that are used in the built-in control templates are public.

Right-to-left and Localization
All docking UI supports right-to-left layouts and all text in the user interface may be localized to other languages.

XBAP Support
Docking & MDI fully supports use in XBAPs (browser applications). Actipro have specifically engineered it to operate within the bounds of the XBAP security sandbox.

Extensive Documentation and Samples
Actipro has spent a lot of time refining the design of Docking & MDI to take advantage of WPF best practices. They realize that a good product is only part of the equation though and have also worked very hard to write detailed documentation on the product. In addition to that, Docking & MDI ships with the full source code for many QuickStart examples that each focus on learning a specific feature.