Click for larger screenshotLidor Systems.Collector V1.5, $149
Lidor Systems
Radovis, Macedonia
+389 32 634 944
http://www.lidorsystems.com/
There are a batch of controls out there that will give you docking and tabs for your .NET applications. Here's a relatively new entrant to the market, which combines a full-featured implementation of those UI features with an excellent design-time experience. If you're looking to cram more controls into limited user interface space, and still allow some runtime user flexibility, tabs and moveable windows are essential tools; Collector will give you a solidly useable implementation at a reasonable price.
The Collector offers a multi-level hierarchy of controls for laying out complex forms. At the top you have the Bar, which lets you set the overall visual style and serves as a container for everything else. Within a Bar you can place one or more Group controls, which can have an independent look and style if you choose. Group controls in turn host Page controls, which are the layout containers for things like buttons and textboxes and labels and so on. One very nice (and innovative) feature of the Page control is that it hosts a special container called the TableObject. This provides a full design-time table-based layout engine, which makes it a snap to create forms with things lined up nicely horizontally and vertically. At design time, you can see (and adjust) the cells of your TableObject to put things where you want them (and control things like the alignment and sizing of cells); at runtime the cells vanish and you're left with controls sitting where you want them. TableObjects can be nested for arbitrarily complex layouts.
Collector is well-suited to complex layouts: indeed, you can create layouts more complex than I would care to throw at actual users. If you want a set of sliding bars inside a set of tabbed pages inside a bar inside dockable groups, well, knock yourself out. It all works the way you'd expect (if you're an expeerienced user), but please remember that too many window widgets can get confusing. Windows Classic and XP, Office 2003 and VS.NET 2003 and 2005 visual styles are all supported, and of course you can set colors and fills and partial transparency to your heart's content. You can set icons in bar headers or watermarks in panels easily. Windows expand and collapse or hide and show with appropriate runtime effects, and things can be dragged around and redocked and floated by the user. The docking works at both design time and runtime, which is convenient.
Collector is compatible with .NET 1.1 and 2.0 (though the help file requires the plumbing from Visual Studio 2003; if you install the current build on a pure VS2005 system the documentation won't open). There's a 30-day evaluation download (with a clickthrough evaluation screen on each use) if you'd like to take a closer look.
Click for larger screenshot
Mike Gunderloy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics.
Published December 19, 2005