Recommendations on a WPF Docking Library

Question

We are implementing an application that needs dockable windows, similar to Visual Studio 2005/2008, but with multiple \"docking sites\", unlike VS\'s single one. Does anyone

Answer 1

1 year later ... AvalonDock is now stable and robust. There's also an "AvalonDock wrapper" that simplifies working with it without reducing its possibilities. See http://sofawpf.codeplex.com/

Answer 2

Don't forget AvalonDock on GitHub (part of WPF Toolkit). I've seen it mentioned in other places.

Initially I was going to use the ActiPro library (mostly because I am already using their ribbon), but I might give AvalonDock a chance since it is open source.

Anybody have any feedback/comments on AvalonDock?

Answer 3

The one from Codeproject is the AvalonDock - we use it for more then half a year now, but we're far from release yet so we have the flexibility. Before ending up with AvalonDock we tried Infragistix, ActiPro, SandDock and may be some others. Even though AvalonDock is not 100% bug free (well what is?) there are no major ones, it is very stable, fast and has all the functionality. It does support multiple docking sites.

Its an open source project and is in active development, so bugs are beeing found and fixed. Good experience so far.

Answer 4

SandDock is alright. We used it for a POC phase of a project. I found some pretty bad bugs in their layout saving mechanism. It generated XML, but then couldn't load this XML back; it threw an exception! I actually read through all the generated XML and had to write code to modify the XML slightly after each time it was generated. It did not seem like it was a well thought out design; I was hoping for common WPF base types like

Infragistics is a bit better but buggy. In fact, if you try running it on a machine that only has .Net 3.0 and no .Net 3.5, it doesn't work correctly. Have an outstanding dev issue with Infragistics and I don't know if they've made any progress on a fix for this. I've also had it crash a few times when floating a window and dragging it around (suspect this has to do with the .Net 3.0/3.5 issue above). I've found styling this control to be pretty un-intuitive.

Answer 5

I tried all the libraries listed here and they're all buggy to some extent. Although they are pricy I would recommend Telerik and Infragistics. Nevron merits a mention because their library is the best I've seen but it's for WinForms.

Answer 6

I use DotNetBar, because it has ribbon/dock and more controls, and it's inexpensive. It's great.

http://www.devcomponents.com/dotnetbar-wpf/