SandDock for WPF by Divelements

Now that Visual Studio 2008 has been released, one of the real fruits of my job is to see how our customers end up using our product.  Specifically, I really enjoy seeing how WPF Control Developers end up using the WPF Designer Extensibility API that I talk about so much on this blog.

If you have examples of how you are using extensibility for your WPF controls -- please drop me a line (you can send a message from this blog) and I'll definitely blog about your product.

The first example I received that shows off design time extensibility comes from divelements - SandDock for WPF.

SanDock is a very cool set of controls that provide a vast array of Window Management functionality.  Here is a shot of their demo application inside the designer. (showing off how you can redock your windows at design time using adorners)

Here they use MenuActions to add context menu items that help the user configure their application:

Finally, here is a more clear shot of their clever use of adorners to provide a design time window docking functionality similar to the dockable windows feature in Visual Studio:

They have also made their own EverythingPolicy (to show adorners on more elements than just the primary selection), ParentAdapter (to handle reparenting), and DefaultInitializer (note the XAML spit when instantiating their controls from the toolbox),

Lots of great illustrations of how you can use the power of Cider's extensibility model to create a first class design time experience.

Here is the divelements page describing the designer support: https://www.divelements.co.uk/net/controls/sanddockwpf/documentation/designer.htm