Not seeing any docking guides

Hi Joakim.  We have not personally seen this or had any other reports of this behavior, so it likely is something environmental.

The dock guides are windows with transparent backgrounds that appear above the host application.  Each window is created, opacity is animated for a fade in effect, and then the window is set to top-most.  If the window is not displayed, it likely means one of those aspects is causing the issue.  For example, if opacity never animates from zero then the window won't be visible.  If the top-most flag is not set, the window may appear behind the host application.

I suspect the issue may be with the rendering pipeline, though.  My first suggestion would be to try to run the application with software-based rendering only.  Using our Sample Browser you downloaded from the public repository, add the following lines to the BuildAvaloniaApp method in the Program.cs file of the SampleBrowser.Desktop project (it can be placed right before ".WithInterFont()"):

.With(new Win32PlatformOptions {
    RenderingMode = [Win32RenderingMode.Software],
    CompositionMode = [Win32CompositionMode.RedirectionSurface]
})

Retest and see if the dock guides appear.  If they do, it likely points to a hardware rendering issue that might be driver-related.

If the issue persists, the next test would be to disable opacity animation in our demo to see if that changes behavior for you.  Under the SampleBrowser.Common project, open /ProductSamples/DockingSamples/Demos/SimpleIde/MainControl.axaml.  For the DockSite defined in that file, add the following:

IsDockGuideAnimationEnabled="False"

Please reset with that change and let us know the outcome.

Hi,

Thanks for quick and detailed reply. Unfortunately neither change worked, in isolation or combination.

Thank you for trying those options, and I'm sorry you are encountering these issues during the evaluation.  If you could please continue to provide feedback, we will try our best to help resolve what might be causing this issue.  The items below should only take a moment.

First, please try running our Sample Browser and open the Docking sample called "Simple IDE".  On the Options menu of that sample, check the option "Use Hosted Floating Windows".  With that enabled, try dragging tool or document windows and let us know if you see the dock guides.  This mode eliminates floating windows entirely and will help ensure that the styles used for dock guide UI components are loading properly.

While dragging windows in this configuration, you should see the dock guides and large blue rectangles called dock previews.  When you mentioned that your normal testing does not show dock guides, can you confirm if the dock previews were displayed?

With the Sample Browser still open, click the version label in the bottom right of the status bar.  That should open an "Environment Information" window with basic details about the environment.  Please copy that to the clipboard and send to us.

Since the theory is that this is an environmental issue, do you have another machine you can test on?  If so, please let us know if that machine works or not and how it compares to what you used for the initial testing.

The next steps will require more advanced diagnostic scenarios, so could you please submit a ticket to our support email address and mention this forum post?  You can include your feedback to this post in that ticket.  Having a support ticket will make it easier to share attachments.

First of all, excellent support. Kudos.

Secondly.
"First, please try running our Sample Browser and open the Docking sample called "Simple IDE".  On the Options menu of that sample, check the option "Use Hosted Floating Windows".  With that enabled, try dragging tool or document windows and let us know if you see the dock guides.  This mode eliminates floating windows entirely and will help ensure that the styles used for dock guide UI components are loading properly."

This. This appears to solve everything. At the cost of not being able to use floating windows it seems.

Here is the environment details:

OS: Microsoft Windows NT 10.0.26200.0
.NET: 10.0.12
Avalonia: 12.1.3
Actipro: 26.2.0

Main Window
- Screen Bounds: 1176, 181, 1216, 839
- Client Area: 1200, 831
- Render Scaling: 100%

Screen 1 (Primary, Current)
- Orientation: Landscape
- Bounds: 0, 0, 2560, 1440
- Working Area: 0, 0, 2560, 1392
- Scaling: 100%

At the moment I do not have any other machine to test on, but maybe the above could give us some more insight? Although I would like to support floating windows, it may not be a hard requirement, but still.

We certainly want you to be able to use floating windows.  The "hosted floating windows" feature is more beneficial for environments where you can't float a window (like inside a browser), but that should at least give you an idea of how the feature is supposed to look.

Can you confirm if the blue dock previews are visible when NOT using the hosted floating windows feature?

I'd also like to rule out if any level of transparency on a window is causing issues in your environment.  Leave "Use Hosted Floating Windows" unchecked.  Then from the same Options menu, check "Non-Hosted Floating Windows Transparent When Dragging".  When you do that and drag a floating window, do you see it become semi-transparent until you stop dragging?

Thank you for the environment information.  That rules out DPI scaling as a potential cause.

If you send an email to our support address, I could also reply to that with a simple sample to help verify if some basic concepts work as expected in your environment.

"Can you confirm if the blue dock previews are visible when NOT using the hosted floating windows feature?"
When NOT using the hosted floating windows feature, no guides, no blue dock previews, nothing, is visible. You can still dock, but you have to kind of guestimate where to drop the window.

"I'd also like to rule out if any level of transparency on a window is causing issues in your environment.  Leave "Use Hosted Floating Windows" unchecked.  Then from the same Options menu, check "Non-Hosted Floating Windows Transparent When Dragging".  When you do that and drag a floating window, do you see it become semi-transparent until you stop dragging?"
There is no difference between the two; all I get for either option is a black, sqaured, outline matching the window size, with the inside completely transparent / unfilled with anything.

Will send an email linking to this thread.

Thanks, again, for continuing to work with us through the support ticket.

For anyone that stubles upon this post in the future, there was a bug with Docking where it did not recognize drag operations properly if the Windows OS performance feature "Show window contents while dragging" was turned off.  This issue has been resolved and will be included in the v26.2.1 release.