Windows Developer Power Tools

2.2 Creating Dockable Windows with DockPanel Suite

You want to create a professional-looking Windows Forms application, and you’d like to make use of the Multiple Document Interface (MDI) so you can have multiple panes or windows in your application. The MDI gives you great visual benefits and a huge amount of functionality, including the ability to merge menus for different content windows into the main application’s menu structure. All of this is nice, but it’s very difficult to create that infrastructure on your own.

DockPanel Suite, created by Weifen Luo, takes this burden off your hands and lets you concentrate on the program logic instead of window management. DockPanel Suite is a library of components and controls that enable you to do things like mimic the docking behavior of Visual Studio 2005. You get full functionality for features such as drag-and-drop windows with docking icons, auto-hide for docked windows, mouse-hover reveals of hidden windows, and more. You can even persist window states to an XML file and use those settings to restore the window configuration in a different session.

DockPanel Suite at a Glance
Tool	DockPanel Suite
Version covered	1.0.0.0
Home page	http://sourceforge.net/projects/dockpanelsuite/
Power Tools page	http://www.windevpowertools.com/tools/60
Summary	Bring Visual Studio–like docking panels to your Windows Forms applications
License type	Public Domain ...