The WinForms Docking Manager control provides an interface to create Visual Studio-like dockable windows in your applications. Dock panels support many interactions like docking, floating, tabbing, auto hiding, and grouping document tabs. The control allows users to resize, move, and change the behavior of windows to create a layout that suits various development models.
Dockable windows can be dragged anywhere by users, float around the screen, and be pinned and unpinned. As in Visual Studio, the Docking Manager control offers different kinds of windows:
End users can restrict windows to dock at specific sides of a target or at specific edges of a form. End users can also customize the dock hint visibility so that they are shown only on horizontal, vertical, or specific sides.
Users can interactively resize windows using a splitter between them. Resizing can be restricted with minimum and maximum sizes for views.
Built-in redock support saves the previous state of dock or float windows and moves the windows back to the state after double-clicking on a caption.
The WinForms Docking Manager can arrange groups of dock, float, and auto-hidden tabs in an extended style, allowing the tabs in the non-visible region to be displayed by scrolling.
Docking hints are displayed to indicate valid drop locations for docking panels while dragging the float window. The appearance of the dock hints can be customized with built-in styles.
Dock panels can be moved to different states using a built-in context menu that appears after right-clicking on their captions. Improve the end-user experience by adding custom context menu entries.
Hide the visibility of a dock window caption to make the dock window appearance a flat panel. The WinForms Docking Manager allows changing the visibility of dock window captions dynamically.
Display each document as a separate window within the client area. This allows users to work with more than one document at the same time and seamlessly switch back and forth between docked windows and MDI forms.
The WinForms Docking Manager supports grouping relevant documents in separate tab groups and allows tab group creation in both horizontal and vertical orientations. This helps users display multiple open documents, similar to MDI windows.
Built-in serialization options support saving a dock layout in different formats upon closing and restoring it upon opening the application.
Allows users to create nested docking layouts with docked windows inside other docked windows, or directly dock windows to the main form.
Easily drag child windows from one docking manager to another by linking different docking managers together.
Provides a rich set of built-in themes like Office-style, Blend, Metro, and Visual Studio.
The WinForms Docking Manager supports localization to translate static text to any supported language.
A right-to-left (RTL) direction setting is available for users working in right-to-left languages like Hebrew, Arabic, or Persian.
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