SandDock for Windows Forms

SandDock is a powerful window layout and management engine designed to quickly and easily add advanced document paging and dockable windows functionality to your applications. Its components provide a modern replacement for the standard Windows MDI paradigm and an advanced dockable windows system that supports complex layout systems, collapsible control groups and intuitive redocking tools.

The unparalleled design-time support of SandDock means it only takes a few clicks of the mouse to get dockable windows set up and working in your form. All the hard work is taken care of, leaving you to configure your GUI the best way possible - visually. You can perform window docking at design time just like you can at runtime, making SandDock the easiest tool of its kind to configure and integrate.

Like our other products, SandDock has a fully pluggable rendering engine. Every part of the drawing process can be completely taken over for maximum flexibility. SandDock ships with four renderers, that mimic the appearance of Visual Studio 2003, Office 2003, Visual Studio 2005 and Office 2007. Each renderer has a range of color schemes that can be applied.

Using the newer tabbed MDI interface is a great lightweight alternative to traditional MDI applications. Documents can still be rearranged and split in almost any way thinkable to ensure that the greatest flexibility of presentation is achieved. This new paradigm is used by applications such as Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 to manage its windows, and is quickly gaining momentum as the standard to replace traditional MDI.

The SandDock library is small, lightweight and fast. It has a powerful and robust object model that exposes a simple and friendly API so that taking programmatic control of your windows is easy. Under the surface it is possible to achieve granular control over every window setting and allow the user to rearrange as much or as little of your interface as you like.