How To Limit DockManager Region

Hmm... the dock controls should always be trying to be "innermost". Note that we have a status bar docked at the bottom of our sample form and they never dock to the outer side of that. The same behavior should be occuring for any docked control. I'm wondering if it has something to do with your command bars being ActiveX.

Anyhow, yes you can set the HostContainerControl to be something other than the Form if you'd like. I believe it can be any container control. But if you change it, you'd probably have to remove all your current tool windows in the designer first and then programmatically change it in the InitializeComponent code since once that property is set, it can't be changed.

Thanks. The ActiveX controls don't actually get Docked like the status bar in your sample, so that's presenting the primary problem. Otherwise, I don't think there would be a problem. I'm not sure docking is an option in this situation since the control allows you to simultaneous dock CommandBars to all four sides of the Main Form.

At this point, I'm not using the Designer since I've created individual UserControls for each of my tool windows. I'm just creating ToolWindows programmatically and setting the ChildControl to my UserControls.

How do I get the alterate container to work? I tried adding a Panel to my main form and dragging DockManager to it. DockManager still lists the HostContainerControl as my main form. If I drop down the HostContainerControl list in the Properties for DockManager, I don't see my Panel as an available container. Do I have to set the container programmatically? Am I overlooking something obvious?

We'll work on allowing the HostContainerControl to be changed in the designer.

For now, if you want to change it, remove all the tool windows and change its setting via code in InitializeComponent. That will get you working on a different container.

Right now HostContainerControl is a ContainerControl. Panel doesn't inherit from that. Maybe put a UserControl instead of a Panel on your form.

I ended up creating a UserControl and dropping DockManager on that control. I then just exposed the DockManager on that control as a property so that I could create a direct reference on my Main Form. I've been able to work around the ActiveX Command Bars to properly size the UserControl (and thus DockManager) within the available client area.

As suspected, normal MDI mode won't work with this technique, but Tabbed MDI does. Thanks for the suggestion!

We have some code implemented that should now let you change the HostContainerControl if you have no tool windows associated with it. This code will be in the next maintenance release.