We all have our favourite IDE, and they all provide pretty advanced docking features. Many control libraries in WinForms, WPF, Swing etc have provided this functionality over the years. But are docking suites – which can be complex, fiddly beasts – designed by and for developers what other users really want?

Remember when Google first released Chrome? Tearing tabs out immediately felt so easy and natural I wondered why no-one had done it before. It was one of those UX paradigms that just works. So in designing the docking library for Dragablz I wanted to reduce the complexity of what we have come to expect and provide a UX experience that is much more easy and free flowing. I’ve tried this before on an enterprise application I have been working on and it’s pretty successful with the user base.

The gif below illustrates the simplicity of having quick, easy access dock “zones” that are easy to throw a tab into, instead of having more, smaller, fiddly areas which are harder to hit in traditional setups.

There’s still a little way to go to polish up the code but the basics can be seen in the demo project in the main solution in GitHub.