DockStudioXP Feature Summary

Visual Styles

  • Office97, 2000, XP, Visual Studio.NET and Office 2003 visual styles;
  • Automatic image generation for disabled/hot/pressed buttons. Can be individually overriden;
  • Drop shadows (XP and Office 2003 Style);
  • Small, medium and large icon collections;
  • Blended grayscale disabled icon option;
  • Inbuilt support for Most Recently Used lists;
  • Inbuilt support for Window lists;
  • Full support for 256 color modes (commonly used over terminal services).

Tool Types

  • Command button;
  • Edit (Text Box);
  • Combo Box;
  • Popup Menu;
  • Fly-out Toolbar;
  • Split Popup Button;
  • Custom Popup (containing a custom form);
  • MRU List (self managing);
  • Window List (self managing);
  • Label;
  • Progress.

Bar Types

  • Menu;
  • Toolbar;
  • Status Bar;
  • Context Menus;
  • Menu and tool bars can be floating, or docked to any part of the form border using drag and drop; 

Docking Windows

  • Dock to any side of the application window;
  • Dock multiple windows in the same location to create Visual Studio.NET style Tab-docked windows;
  • DockWindows can be collapsed to buttons (ala Visual Studio.NET);
  • Collapsed DockWindows can be grouped (ala Visual Studio.NET);
  • Visual Studio.NET, Windows XP Themed, Office XP, VB6, Visual C++ and Visio 2003 styles;
  • Control DockWindow state programmatically.

Integrated document management

  • Integrated support for SDI, MDI and Tabbed MDI document views;
  • Tab grouping support for Tabbed MDI mode, as implemented in Visual Studio.NET;
  • Drag and drop re-ordering of document tabs;

  • In Tabbed MDI mode, documents can be repositioned for side by side editing into logical groups, in any position, simply by dragging a tab into the desired position.

Visual layout designer

  • Fully visual designer;
  • Drag and drop tools to compose tool layout;
  • Drag and drop DockWindows at design time to design layout;
  • Organize complex lists by category or tool type;
  • Customizable property page size;
  • CSS-like style organisation makes it easy to apply and modify tool styles and properties;
  • Style manager to easily switch between overall styles;
  • Code generation for commonly used events and enumerations (Visual Basic 6, VB.NET, C# and Visual C++)
  • Integrated image editor;
  • Integrated image capture tool (for easily capturing tool images).

Layout Persistence

  • Save and load layouts to/from multiple formats (XML, binary, resource files and UUEncoded strings);
  • Selectively load and save aspects of the layout (command bars, dock window state etc.).

On-line help and samples

  • Comprehensive on-line help;
  • Full reference and conceptual information;
  • Example code;
  • Illustrative sample projects.
  • Dynamic help available from the visual layout designer.

Comprehensive object model

  • Rich object model;
  • Programmatic access to both layout and dock state of tools and DockWindows;
  • CSS-like style organisation;
  • Innovative local/global event model.