Lately we've been working on adding features to our Docking & MDI for WPF product. One area that we've just enhanced is customization of the document window and tool window tabs. You may have seen this feature in Office 2007 OneNote, which uses colored tabs.
This new feature will be in the next WPF Studio release (build 503).
Colored Tabs
We've added several properties to DocumentWindow and ToolWindow that can be used to customize the look of the associated tab, if any. You can explicitly define the brushes used for the normal, hover, and selected states. Alternatively, you can specify a tint color and the default brushes will automatically be tinted toward that color. In the image below, the document windows use a tint color and the tool windows explicitly define brushes for the various states. You can see that the document tabs use a gradient just like the default look.
With these new properties, you can define a SolidColorBrush that uses a ColorAnimation and produce a flashing effect. This can be used to alert the user that something needs their attention. We provide a sample that shows how this can be done using an attached behavior, which includes full source code.
Document Outline
When using a tabbed MDI, the documents are surrounded with a 5-pixel wide outline (just like Visual Studio 2008). One problem with coloring the document tabs is that this outline doesn't blend well with customized brushes. If you use the tinting feature described above, then the outline will automatically be updated to match. So if the selected document is tinted toward red (as seen in the image below), then the outline will also be tinted toward red.
Summary
You can use this new feature to alert the end-user, associate colors with certain functions or features in your application, or much more.