SandDock for Silverlight

What's New in SandDock for Silverlight V1.3:

• NEW: Full designer integration with Visual Studio 2010 RC1.
• NEW: Perspective transform introduced for popup window animation; is now the default.
• NEW: LayoutSerialization.GuidString attached property added to work around Silverlight being unable to specify Guid literals in XAML.
• CHANGE: Minimum Silverlight platform is now 3.0.

What's New in V1.2?
This release adds many features to the standalone windowing support in the product, bringing true MDI functionality to Silverlight. Windows support maximization and minimization, and resizing of windows by the user can be fully controlled (as can moving). Windows have also received cosmetic improvements, with a system icon and smooth, subtle animations when they are opened and closed. Modal dialogs have been improved with the addition of a DialogResult property, and all windows can be automatically sized to contents or cascaded.

Improved in this release is the window memory for dockable window layouts, and handling of focus when windows are opened and closed.

There is a breaking change in this release. Previously, to set the size of standalone windows, you would use the Width and Height properties directly. This will no longer work; the attached WindowHost.RestoredSize property must be used instead.

SandDock for Silverlight brings advanced windows management to your websites, allowing you to divide your applications into windows that can be docked, floating and collapsed by the user. Modal windows are also supported. By plugging SandDock into your project you can forget about the intricacies of window layout; instead, provide your windows to SandDock and let it present them with all the tools your users need for full customization of the working area. Tool windows become dockable, sticking to the sides of your window in hierarchies chosen visually by the user; or they can be floated above your main window, or even collapsed to the side. Documents are presented in a tabbed fashion, with split views for easy comparison between content.

Silverlight contains no window management functionality of its own. Written entirely on the Silverlight platform, SandDock is able to offer all these features with extras like smooth animated transitions and effects. When interactively dragging windows around to redock them, dynamic docking hints fade in and out to help guide the window placement. If you don't want to use a full layout you can use the floating window functionality on its own, including modal window support.

Developers integrating SandDock into their pages can use styles and templates to customize (or completely change) the look and feel of the product. The runtime API is very straightforward and creating a complex window layout through code is easy. Alternatively, XAML makes configuring a SandDock layout at design-time a breeze. You can persist window layout from one session to another using layout serialization; this can also be used to split your application into multiple view states. Docking rules allow you to restrict where the user is able to place your windows. Events are raised so your application can be constantly notified of changes to window positions and activation.

SandDock Features in Depth
SandDock supports virtually all the window management capabilities of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. It presents these features in a developer-friendly package which means these advanced capabilities can be integrated into your application in minutes.

Feature Summary

• Dockable Windows
• Floating Windows
• Collapsed Groups
• Tabbed Documents
• Layout Serialization

Features in Depth

Dockable Windows
Windows are dockable within the main container. The user can drag them to any side of the container to create complex groupings of windows, arranged in the most logical fashion for the task at hand. Hierarchies of arbitrary complexity can be created, and once windows are docked together they can be resized independently with the splitters between them. As a developer you can control which sides of the container the window can be docked to - or whether the window can be docked at all.

When multiple windows are docked into the same group, tabs appear for navigation between them. Dragging by the titlebar moves the whole group, dragging by the tab moves the individual window. Standard keyboard shortcuts work to allow keyboard navigation between tabs.

Floating Windows
When a window is dragged from its location to a space in the container not recognised as another dock location, the window can be floated. Intuitive docking hints guide the user while a docking operation is in progress, making it easy to see where their window will end up. Multiple windows can be housed together in the same floating group. The developer has full control over whether a window is allowed to be floated.

Collapsed Groups
When a window is docked, it can be "unpinned", where it collapses down to a small tab representation of itself at the side of your container. The user can still access the window by clicking its tab or using a keyboard shortcut, but the window is not always present on screen. When accessed, the window pops up using smooth animation and is present until the user is done with it, whereupon it collapses down again.

The transition effects when a collapsed window pops up and subsequently disappears can be set by the developer.

Tabbed Documents
If your application is document-oriented you will likely want to take advantage of the tabbed document interface (TDI) support in SandDock. As with any SandDock windows, you can simply let the software take care of all layout, leaving your application to implement its core logic. Tabbed document navigation is more than just tabs - the layout engine allows users to split documents into multiple panes with proportional resizing for easy comparisons between documents.

Of course, if you wish to allow it, your documents can also be "torn off" to become floating windows or docked to the sides of your container. Such potential functionality is shared between all SandDock windows.

Layout Serialization
A complete SandDock layout can be a complex thing. A combination of tool windows; some docked, some floating, some collapsed; and tabbed documents, all potentially arranged into hierarchies. This is great for the user, but they will expect their layout to be persisted from one application session to the next. This is very easy to achieve. We provide a method that serializes the entire layout as a string containing XML, that can be persisted to the storage medium of your choice and restored upon the next application load.

Specifications
SandDock for Silverlight supports the following Web browsers; Internet Explorer 7, 8, Firefox 1, 2 and Safari 1, 2, and supports the Visual Studio 2008 with SP1 development environment.

About Silverlight and SandDock for Silverlight
Silverlight is a very young platform with its user-interface framework loosely based upon the existing Windows Presentation Foundation. Although the API is virtually identical to a subset of WPF, it is implemented with a very different codebase and the controls shipped with the product are somewhat primitive. However, it is familiar enough for WPF developers to be able to dive straight in and start working. Nobody knows WPF better than the people who spend most of their time building controls for it (people like Divelements) and the same goes for Silverlight too.

Like WPF, Silverlight contains a platform-integrated method of allowing customers to completely change the look and feel of the controls using nothing but markup, and this is encouraged as much as possible. In Divelements’ SandDock product they ship the source code for example "skins" that completely change the appearance of the product to match that of well-known applications such as Microsoft Expression Blend.

There are no designer tools shipping for Silverlight yet aside from Expression Blend, which does not provide facilities for control authors to customize the design-time experience. However the next version of the "Cider" designer - shipping with the next version of Visual Studio - will contain such tools and Divelements are working closely with Microsoft to ensure that when it ships they will have the best designer experience available for their products.

Because Silverlight is a web-based platform, it's more important than ever to ensure that the runtimes you depend on are as small as possible. Divelements’ controls are well architected in order to bring you a powerful API for the task, but wrapped in a very small assembly.

All license purchases include unlimited free email support and one year of product updates and hotfixes.