Visual Studio style toolwindow grouping - Docking/MDI for Windows Forms Forum

Posted 19 years ago by Ty Oh - AgileSoftware

Hi there,
With the power of toolwindows, we're getting excited and using lots of them (20+). I was wondering if the grouping style of Visual Studio is available for grouped toolwindows in AutoHidden state (non-focused toolwindows in a group is represented by the icon only when in AutoHidden state). This would save realestate and add a professional LookAndFeel to the overall application. Currently it is rather unorganised with too many toolwindows.

I'll email you a screenshot of what I mean.

Cheers
Ty

Comments (2)

Posted 19 years ago by Actipro Software Support - Cleveland, OH, USA

Hi Ty,

Hehe... we love tool windows too! Yes, UIStudio supports what you are describing. Actually in our sample app, if you choose the Visual Studio 2002 renderer, it does just that for auto-hide tab groups. It will show the image/text of the selected tab and only the images of the unselected tabs in each auto-hide group.

With UIStudio, you can completely customize the rendering. So if you wanted a newer style than the Visual Studio 2002, you can use one of our other renderers as a base class and then override the draw and measure methods to achieve this behavior. Our Visual Studio 2005 renderer doesn't hide the text of the tabs since VS 2005 doesn't either anymore. But then again, they don't have 20+ tool windows like you do.

Actipro Software Support

Posted 19 years ago by Ty Oh - AgileSoftware

Hey you're right, I was using the office2003 renderer, you guys definitely have it covered!

Strange though how MS decided not to do this by default with VS2005?

Yes, we lo~ve toolwindows!
I'm pretty sure we'll also lo~ve menus/toolbars.

Thanks heaps!

The latest build of this product (v24.1.0) was released 5 months ago, which was after the last post in this thread.

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