We've spent the last several months working intensely on completely rebuilding the internals of our market-leading WPF Docking/MDI product.  This project is called "Docking/MDI vNext" and keeps the same general API surface, while providing even more advanced features in every area of the product, evolving it into a true best-of-breed docking tool window and MDI functionality solution.

Project Status

Great news… after several months of development and testing, Docking/MDI vNext is now out of beta and considered complete!  Check out our recent blog posts to see a list of several of the major features that are included in this new version.

The updates we made will be released as part of our WPF Controls 2016.1 offering that will likely officially roll out live in January or early February.  We'll have a full summary of the new features on the blog then.

Looking for 2016.1 Preview Testers

If you would like to get a preview build of 2016.1 and start working with everything now, please write our support address.  The major Docking/MDI vNext updates are considered code complete and stable at this point.  We have new and updated samples and documentation, updated Prism 6.1 compatibility, and a lot more.  The documentation gives detail on all new features and any breaking changes you might encounter.  We'd love to get some more users including it their apps and giving us some final feedback before a public release.

New maintenances of our WPF, Silverlight, and WinRT/XAML controls have been released and are now available for download.

These releases mostly focus on minor feature additions and bug fixes as we prepare to start work on our 2016.1 versions.  See these announcement posts for the detailed list of enhancements and updates:

• WPF Controls announcement
• Silverlight Controls announcement
• WinRT/XAML Controls announcement

We've spent the last several months working intensely on completely rebuilding the internals of our market-leading WPF Docking/MDI product.  This project is called "Docking/MDI vNext" and keeps the same general API surface, while providing even more advanced features in every area of the product, evolving it into a true best-of-breed docking tool window and MDI functionality solution.

Beta Testing Progress

A couple weeks ago we began the beta testing process for Docking/MDI vNext and thus far, it's been going very well.  The product has proven to be very stable and only a handful of minor tweaks and adjustments have been needed.  At this point, the product is considered feature-complete for its first shipping version.

We've been spending time during this beta testing period improving some samples and adding/updating lots of product documentation.  There are an enormous number of new features in vNext, so we want to make sure we cover everything.

What's Next

Our plan is to launch final 2015.1 version maintenance releases next week and then start transitioning internally to 2016.1 codebases.  Then we'll begin swapping in Docking/MDI vNext in place of the classic Docking/MDI product and will get all the related samples, documentation, etc. merged and ready to go.

We've spent the last several months working intensely on completely rebuilding the internals of our market-leading WPF Docking/MDI product.  This project is called "Docking/MDI vNext" and keeps the same general API surface, while providing even more advanced features in every area of the product, evolving it into a true best-of-breed docking tool window and MDI functionality solution.

Call for Beta Testers

We've been posting on our blog about many of the major new features coming your way in vNext.  We're pleased to announce that all of those features are now code-complete and we are preparing for a private beta test.

We already have received numerous beta tester requests.  If you have written us, we will be contacting you in the next several days!

If you are an existing customer and haven't yet contacted us about being a beta tester, please write our support address, tell us how you plan to use the vNext beta in your applications, and we'll get you signed up into the beta program.  We look forward to hearing from you!

As mentioned in this previous post, we've been looking for ideas to further improve our WPF Docking/MDI product, which already is the market leader for docking tool window and MDI functionality.  We've committed to working on a complete internal restructuring of the product that we will call Docking/MDI vNext.  We're doing our best to keep the same general API surface, while providing even more advanced features in every area of the product.  We've collected suggestions from our customers over the past several years and are working to meet them as best we can with Docking/MDI vNext.

In today's post, we'll show a new feature coming in Docking/MDI vNext that lets you limit floating window sizes.

Feature Description

Let's first have a look at a typical docking window layout here, where we have several tabbed documents that take up much of the screen real estate.

What happens when you drag to float a document, or float it via its context menu, is that you normally get a floating window of the same size.  You can see this in the next screenshot, where much of the entire dock site is now covered by the floating window.

While apps like Visual Studio do this, we've added the ability for you to limit how large you want the floating window to be.  In this last screenshot, we've handled a new dock site event that lets us customize the floating window size before it's displayed.  We've limited its size to a maximum of 600x300 and the result is this appearance when the document is floated:

We personally like this feature because the document is still a decent size but doesn't obscure everything behind it.

Summary

The feature described above is completely optional.  By default, everything will work as in the second screenshot when you float a large document.  But by handling the new event and applying some size-limiting logic in it, you can easily get results like in the last screenshot.

Docking/MDI vNext is currently near the end of its code development stages.  Please contact us via email if you are an existing customer and would like to sign up as a beta tester for vNext.  If you have any other suggestions for improving Docking/MDI, now is the time to get them in.  We'll post more updates on our vNext improvements soon.

In the meantime, please download our current Docking/MDI control product and give it a spin.