Docking windows forms

This seemed like a great idea but after hours of playing with all of the messages, I was unable to find what I was looking for.

What I was really looking for was a way to stop the repainting of the form while it was being moved so that then I could repaint it only when the form wasn't in the designated docking distance of the parent form.

If I kept going down that road, the only way I could see to do it would be to stop the form from going into "moving" mode, then track the mouse movements on the screen with a WIN32 GetCursorPos call, see how that would translate into the hypothetical movement of the form, check the hypothetical new gap distance from the parent form, and end up moving the form manually to its new correct place on the screen.

I am attaching to this post my original simple implementation to try and get this functionality that is far easier to understand than all of this was for me. The one drawback is that when you are moving the form within the gap distance of the parent form, it jumps around a little bit because it is redrawing itself. It is a Visual C Express project and was just meant to test how this could work for me.

I hope it helps someone else out there as well. Cheers, Bentley. Attached Files DockTest. I did some more searching on the net to see how to stop Windows from doing the form move so that I could do it myself programmatically.

It is just a simple example to illustrate the theory and principle of how it can work, so you'll still have to adapt the actual functionality to how you would want it to work in your application. I think it's a good start though. The main change from my previous version is that now instead of using the move event of the form, I am catching the Windows messages that are passed to actually do the moving of the form.

This way I can keep it from moving when I don't want it to. After intercepting the intial message to start the move, I then move the form the way that I intend it to move.

Another change is that now the window will dock with the sides of the screen as well as the sides of Form1. It appears to work pretty smoothly, but if you find it not working correctly or have another way of doing this same type of thing, I would really like to hear about it. Hope it helps someone, Bentley. Hello to anybody still interested in this This morning I've published a working class library and source code onto SourceForge of my most recent version of the form docking functionality.

That issue is that sometimes the operating system decides not to fire move events, probably in an effort to maximize efficiency. This can cause the forms to sometimes become undocked. I have coded around the problem a little bit, but I think the best way would be to approach this functionality from another angle. Possibly an external form movement manager. Perhaps I'll work on that later If you'd like to play around with the source code, feel free to go to the SourceForge link above to download it.

ResumeLayout False. AliceBlue ; this. GetObject "dockingClientPanel1. BackgroundImage" , System. Image ; this. Stretch ;. AliceBlue Me. Image Me. Font "Arial" , 9F , System. Bold , System. Point , byte 0 ; this. RoyalBlue ;. Font "Arial" , 9.

Point , CType 0 , Byte Me. GrowAndShrink ;. Size 1 , 1 ; this. Size 1 , 1. Help us improve this page Correct inaccurate or outdated content Please provide additional information. Gets or sets which control borders are docked to its parent control and determines how a control is resized with its parent. One of the DockStyle values. The default is None. The value assigned is not one of the DockStyle values.

The following code example creates a GroupBox and sets some of its common properties. The example creates a TextBox and sets its Location within the group box. Next, it sets the Text property of the group box, and docks the group box to the top of the form. Lastly, it disables the group box by setting the Enabled property to false , which causes all controls contained within the group box to be disabled.

Getting Started with Windows Forms Docking Manager 17 Nov 12 minutes to read This section explains how to design a DockingManager control in a Windows Forms application and overview of its basic functionalities.

Assembly deployment The following list of assemblies should be added as reference to use the docking manager in any application: Refer control dependencies section to get the list of assemblies or NuGet package needs to be added as reference to use the control in any application. Find more details about how to install the nuget packages in Windows Forms application in the following link: How to install nuget packages Creating simple application with docking manager You can create the Windows Forms application with docking manager control as follows: Creating the project Adding control via Designer Adding control manually in code Add dock child window Change Dock State of child Change Dock Side Make MDI child Serialize Dock windows Creating the project Create a new Windows Forms project in the Visual Studio to dock panels as like Visual Studio using the docking manager.

Adding control via designer To add the docking manager control to an application, drag it from the toolbox and drop in a designer view. The following required assembly references will be added automatically: Syncfusion. DockingManager dockingManager1 ; this. Container ; this. DockingManager this. Private dockingManager1 As Syncfusion. DockingManager Me. Container Me. Panel panel1 ; private System. Panel panel2 ; private System. Panel panel3 ; private System.

Panel panel4 ; this. Panel ; this. SetEnableDocking panel1 , true ; this. SetEnableDocking panel2 , true ; this. SetEnableDocking panel3 , true ; this. SetEnableDocking panel4 , true ;. Private panel1 As System.